Borderlines Film Festival 2024 celebrates great attendances

Taking place across 23 venues in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Malvern and the Marches attendances totalled 21,426, an extraordinary achievement for a film festival located in a very rural, non-metropolitan area.

Staff and board members have been overwhelmed with delighted feedback from festival goers, some of whom travel year on year from locations as far as Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Oxfordshire to watch a stunning selection of films, many of them available to see at Borderlines well before an official UK release date.

Judy Bailey commented on Facebook: “Great festival, so many wonderful films and such lovely volunteers. Have had a great fortnight and heading off to the optician to remedy square eyes!”

And from Keith Ansell: “Bloody love Borderlines Film Festival

Thank you to everyone in the team. Already looking forward to next year’s festival.”

Another pleasing element of this year’s film festival was the participation of so many young people. The Courtyard Cinema’s Young Programming team hosted a preview screening of the documentary Orlando, My Political Biography, a riff on transgender identification based on the novel by Virginia Woolf. The Young Programmers set up a discussion panel to follow the film, while BA (Hons) Illustration students from Hereford College of Arts produced a zine inspired by the themes of the film.

A collaboration with Creative Pathways in the Shire, a scheme run by Ledbury Poetry, provided the opportunity for 16–30 year-olds to review and publish films showing at the festival. Sasha Edmunds, who chose to review the documentary Scala!!!, was thrilled to meet and chat to Ali Catterall, one of the filmmakers, after the screening.

Several of the Young Reviewers also opted to volunteer for shifts on the Festival Desks at The Courtyard in Hereford and at Malvern Theatres. HCA Foundation Student Joseph McIlroy, who wrote about The Zone of Interest and Showing Up,found reviewing "challenging because it's quite a short deadline" but relished the time restriction because it made him get on and do it. "A lot of my mates obviously love watching films, but they don't get down the cinema enough. It's a much more exciting experience."

He enjoyed being on the Festival Desk. "It’s been great I've met lots of different people, people involved in the film industry and stuff. And it's nice to just chat about what people thought about the films. It's just good experience."

Others, like filmmaker Tom Booth, responded to a pre-festival call out for volunteers: "I came to Borderlines as a teenager quite a long time ago and got a lot from it, saw some really amazing films, types of films I hadn't seen anywhere else up until that point. And it’s one of the things that got me hooked onto films, an appreciation of what can be done with cinema.

"Then I went away to film school and trained there, and then been making documentary style promotional material as a job for about 10 years. And I recently moved back to Hereford, and I thought it would be a good option to be there for the whole of the festival, to volunteer and see if there's any people who are similar to me who like filmmaking. And also it's a good excuse to chat about films.

"There's a really, really wide range of films and that encourages a wider range of debate around film, I guess. So you're going to have films that some people don't like, and you're going to have films people really, really like and you're going have films that are going to split the room a little bit. I think that's really important.”

Support from the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, and additional funders such as the Elmley Foundation and Hereford City Council, together with sponsorship by local businesses, groups of friends and individuals make this hugely successful film festival possible.