Industry Day 2026

Calling all filmmakers, artists and documentary-curious people. Do you want to know more about documentary film craft, find out who is funding and distributing independent non-fiction projects and documentary art, and meet with other film creatives and potential collaborators? Then book for this jam-packed day of presentations, panel discussions, case studies, one-to-ones and networking at Creative Folkestone Quarterhouse in partnership with BFI Doc Society and Screen South.

The day features varied and informative panels, including conversations with talented filmmakers and execs about documentary features, shorts, and hybrid projects. Open to all, at any level of experience. The sessions are ‘relaxed ’, and there will be tea and coffee available throughout the day if you need to take a break.

There will also be a chance for Industry Day ticket holders to book 1-to-1s with industry experts. These slots are offered on a first-come, first-served basis and will be available to book on the day, so arrive early to secure a slot!

The Industry Day will be followed by networking drinks at Club Folkestone sponsored by Docker and Dr Jekyll’s mysteriously refreshing beer. Free to Industry Day ticket holders.

Friday 23 October at Folkestone Quarterhouse.

All for the amazing ticket price of £5.

These slots are offered on a first-come, first-served basis and will be available to book on the day, so arrive early to secure a slot!

Confirmed Experts:

Jo Nolan, Screen South, Chief Executive Officer:
Screen South is a Creative Development Agency based in Folkestone, delivering and supporting innovative projects across screen-based media and the wider cultural and creative industries. They are a resource and broker that helps people get their ideas off the ground and supports delivery locally, nationally and internationally.

Their overarching aim is to contribute to stimulating a competitive, successful and vibrant creative industry and culture and to promote its growth, enjoyment and understanding locally and internationally.

Areas of activity that Screen South covers include:

-Production & Development service and delivery
-International brokering
-Training
-Creative Project Management

Jamie Allan, Talent Development Manager, BFI Doc Society Fund:
Jamie Allan leads the Talent Development Programmes for BFI Doc Society. The BFI Doc Society Fund supports and nurtures independent non-fiction film and immersive projects by UK filmmakers, prioritising expansive, director-led storytelling. The BFI Doc Society Fund Talent Development programme is aimed at building connections with documentary filmmakers across all corners of the UK and providing professional development opportunities for filmmakers.

Jamie has a background in documentary filmmaking and was previously the Curator of Artist Film programmes at HOME Manchester and Curator of the Short Film and Community Programmes at Sheffield DocFest.

Kit Colbourne, BFI Doc Society Production Manager:
Kit (they/them/theirs) provides key administrative and production support across the BFI Doc Society film slate, application processes and support programme.  Kit worked extensively in theatre and arts admin before retraining and completing a postgraduate course in Film and Television production. Kit joins us from Met Film, where they worked on the outreach and audience engagement for The Reason I Jump, among other production roles, and more recently was Jerry’s Rothwell’s Director’s Assistant.

Jane Ray, The Whickers:
Set up and now runs The Whickers, a global production fund for emerging documentary talent. She is a multi-award-winning documentary maker in her own right with 29 years on staff at the BBC.

Jane started there as a radio reporter, worked as an investigative journalist and series exec on Document, and ended up as an Editorial Guardian for Worldwide Content and Production. In the 1990s, Jane worked alongside pioneering broadcaster Alan Whicker, whose bequest she was invited to manage for the benefit of aspiring doc makers globally. 

Now she combines the Whickers with running her own company, Cat Flap Media. Cat Flap has consulted on docs selected this year for Sundance and Sheffield and created a podcast for BBC Sounds. They include the award-winning Runa Simi and Hollywoodgate. Other films that she has supported include Hope Frozen (Netflix), Birds Of War, The Hermit of Treig (BBC) and Great Photo, Lovely Life (HBO).

This will be Jane’s third year at FDF and the second time she awards the FDF/Whicker’s Prize for Best Short to a first-time director. 

Sylvia Bednarz, Managing Director, Grierson Trust
The Grierson Trust celebrates excellence in documentary filmmaking through the prestigious Grierson Awards. She leads the Trust’s strategy, partnerships and talent initiatives, including DocLab training programmes and Grierson’s free professional development programme supporting freelance documentary filmmakers. Before joining the Grierson Trust, Sylvia worked across the documentary sector in film and TV production, commissioning for online and television, and film festivals. 

FDF is a Grierson awards qualifying festival.

Emelie Mahdavian, Director & Editor:
Emelie is an Emmy, Peabody, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker whose films have screened at major venues including Telluride Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, and Berlin Film Festival, garnering awards recognition, international press, and receiving international theatrical distribution.

Rebecca Mark-Lawson, Producer:
Rebecca formed Tyke Films in 2015 to produce work with original voices working at the intersection of documentary and fiction. In 2018, Tyke Films was selected for Creative England’s CE50, celebrating the achievements of the best up-and-coming, innovative and disruptive companies across film, games and digital tech. In 2020, Tyke Films won a BFI Vision Award.

Her career began working extensively in production with the likes of Penny Woolcock and Ken Loach, followed by being appointed Development Executive for new talent at EM Media and Managing Executive at Lifesize Pictures before going on to produce and executive produce multiple award-winning documentary and fiction films for Film4, Channel 4, BFI and BBC Films.

Recent credits include the BIFA award-winning feature: Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, The Archivist (FDF, 2026), My Blonde GF (FDF, 2023), Plunge (FDF, 2024) and The Tell-Tale Rooms (VR) (FDF, 2023)

Sylvia Bednarz, Managing Director, Grierson Trust
Sylvia Bednarz is Managing Director at the Grierson Trust, which celebrates excellence in documentary filmmaking through the prestigious Grierson Awards. She leads the Trust’s strategy, partnerships and talent initiatives, including DocLab training programmes and Grierson’s free professional development programme supporting freelance documentary filmmakers. Before joining the Grierson Trust, Sylvia worked across the documentary sector in film and TV production, commissioning for online and television, and film festivals. 

10am - Welcome + Introduction from the Festival Team

This year's keynote session will be led by the team from Glimmerama, the creative distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the company behind this year's festival film All Rivers Spill Their Stories to The Sea and previous festival opening film Your Fat Friend. Jeanie and Suzanne will discuss ideas for rethinking the engagements documentary makers have with audiences through innovative release strategies. Presenting case studies learned from their experiments in documentary distribution crafted for specific audiences, they'll present a new frontier for film releasing done with care.

Glimmerama is the creative distribution arm of Glimmer Films, founded by director Jeanie Finlay and business affairs specialist Suzanne Alizart. Established to demonstrate the value of filmmakers retaining their rights, Glimmerama designs innovative, filmmaker-led distribution strategies that build direct, long-term relationships with audiences.

Jeanie Finlay is one of Britain’s most distinctive documentarists. Jeanie creates award-winning work for cinema and television, telling intimate stories to international audiences.

She has made films for HBO, IFC, and four BBC Storyvilles. Including; Sheffield Documentary Festival audience award winner Your Fat Friend, BIFA nominated Seahorse, Emmy nominated Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch, BIFA nominated The Great Hip Hop Hoax & BIFA winning Orion:The Man Who Would Be King.

Jeanie received a 2023 Chicken & Egg award, an honorary Doctorate by Nottingham Trent University and won an inspiration award at Sheffield Doc/Fest. Her work has been showcased in retrospectives at MOMI, True Story, Criterion Collection and the BFI. Her new film, All Rivers Spill Their Stories to The Sea, is currently releasing in the UK

Suzanne Alizart is an experienced film business affairs professional committed to supporting independent filmmakers. She has worked with UK funders, producers, and directors on a raft of fiction and documentary films; recent projects include Your Fat Friend, Donna, Nothing Compares, A Bunch of Amateurs, and A Story of Bones. 

The process for using and clearing archive material in docs can feel daunting... and expensive. This session will demystify the archive journey, featuring an expert panel who use archive material every day and help others to do it too. What archive material is out there and available to use, and how do you research and discover it? Who do you ask for permission, what are the costs, and how do you negotiate them? What does it mean when material is in the public domain, and is fair dealing actually a thing in the UK? Beyond the admin and finance side, what are best practices for using archive creatively and interestingly in your film?

Featuring:
Stephen Slater, archive Producer specialising in space.

Stephen Slater has over fifteen years’ experience in documentary filmmaking, beginning with his directorial work on the 2011 BBC documentary Destination Titan. As an archive producer specialising in space exploration, he curates an extensive collection of historic NASA footage and has consulted on Hollywood films about the subject. He also produced the visitor experience for the restoration of NASA’s Historic Mission Control Centre at Johnson Space Centre in 2019.

Gonzalo Chacon, director at Footage Farm, UK archive library specialising in Public Domain material

Gonzalo Chacon is a director at Footage Farm Ltd, a FOCAL International award-winning UK library specialising in Public Domain material, which has supplied archival footage to productions worldwide since 2001. With a background in anthropology and an M.A. in Visual Anthropology, he has over 15 years of experience in commercial film libraries, documentary production, and archive research across collections in Venezuela, NARA, and the Library of Congress, regularly collaborating with directors, development teams, archive producers, and editors. He also produced the first Venezuelan documentary to receive the IDFA Bertha Fund, The Silence of the Flies, which won several international awards.

Janet McBride, archive film consultant

Janet McBride is a UK-based freelance archive producer with over 30 years of experience across genres from Comedy Entertainment to Specialist Factual and Historical Documentaries. She joined the BBC Film Archive as a librarian in 1986, where she received extensive training in the research and use of archive film. From there she moved into production at BBC Current Affairs and BBC Light Entertainment, before embarking on a freelance career with a variety of Independent Production companies and broadcasters.  

Over the past three decades she has been an Archive Producer, Series Producer, Executive Producer and Head of Production, enjoying success on an eclectic range of comedy and entertainment programmes including Baddiel & Skinner’s Fantasy Football League and TV’s Naughtiest Blunders for ITV.  As an Archive Producer, she now works mainly with historical and specialist factual productions and has been responsible for award-winning documentaries such as Smithsonian’s When Tariq Ali met Malcolm X and National Geographic’s flagship maritime archaeology series Drain the Oceans. 

She has worked on high-profile documentaries such as BBC Television's Icons, which included profiles of Gandhi, Helen Keller, Picasso and Alfred Hitchcock and has recently delved into the world of art history in a documentary series about the History of Art in Saudi Arabia.

Simon McCallum, Producer (Archive & Industry), BFI

Simon has spent 20 years bringing the riches of the BFI National Archive to a wider audience as a curator, writer and producer, working across BFI digital platforms, cinema seasons, special projects and broadcast partnerships. He now collaborates with production partners to develop creative projects drawing on BFI collections, ranging from docs to XR. His feature documentary credits as Executive Producer for BFI include Explorer, Endurance and Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean; he was Archive Consultant on Queerama, Arcadia and Freedom: 50 Years of Pride.

Chair: Charlie Phillips

More than any other film art form, film is really made in the edit, with documentaries, and your editor has to be your best friend. This session features three top UK editors who will talk about what you need to do as directors and producers to make the edit go well.

Featuring:
Nicole Hálová (All Rivers Spill Their Stories To The Sea)

Nicole Hálová is a documentary editor based in London. She studied film editing at FAMU in Prague. Her most recent work includes Queer Edward II, which will premiere at the Venice Biennale 2026, All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea (Sheffield DocFest 2026), My Father And Qaddafi (Venice Film Festival 2025), and How Deep is Your Love (True/False Film Festival 2025). Other films include Carrousel (2019), which won the Golden Calf award at the Netherlands FF and The Islands and the Whales (2016), which was nominated for an Emmy and a BAFTA Award. She also collaborated on projects with Forensic Architecture such as The Situated Testimonies of Grenfell.

Emelie Mahdavian (The Lake, Sundance Special Jury Prize 2026)

Emelie Mahdavian is an Emmy, Peabody, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker whose films have screened at major venues including Telluride Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, and Berlin Film Festival, garnering awards recognition, international press, and receiving international theatrical distribution.

Cassandra Roberts (Stich and Bitch Editors)

Film Editor and Story Consultant based in London, working wherever the work takes me. Lately that's been Kenya, Fiji and New Zealand. Before London, it was Sydney and New York.

They work across film and TV — documentary, factual entertainment, reality, news, current affairs, comedy, lifestyle, children's TV, music videos. If it tells a story, I'm interested. My work has screened on the BBC, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, National Geographic, PBS, Discovery, Channel 5, MTV, Nickelodeon and Vice, as well as Australian networks ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine and Ten. I've also cut branded content for Red Bull, Harley-Davidson, Durex, Cadbury's and many more.

On the feature documentary side, most recently they edited, co-wrote and co-produced Rhino (nominated Best Editing at the 2025 Wildscreen Panda Awards, UK theatrical run). They story consulted on The Pick Up Game (premiered at Hot Docs and DOCNYC 2019, won Best Director at Melbourne Documentary Film Festival), edited and co-wrote March for Dignity (30+ festivals, European cinema run), and edited/story consulted on India's 1st, Best, Trans Modelling Agency (premiered at BFI Flare 2024)

Chair: James Collie

Bring your own, or buy from the amazing eateries around Quarterhouse.

A session with filmmaker and researcher Ed Webb-Ingall on his new book The Story of British Video Activism. The event will trace the democratising impact of portable video recording technology from the late 1960s to the early 21st century. Webb-Ingall will introduce pioneering and dynamic videomakers showing how video played a powerful role in local and national campaigns on issues including housing, labour struggles and racial justice.

Ed Webb-Ingall will be joined in-conversation by Charlie Phillips.

Meet some of this year's brilliant short filmmakers featured in the festival programme, and hear how they got their films made. Featuring:
Daisy Ifama (Rap Baby)
Roopa Gogineni and Farhaan (Riding Time)
Louisa Rechenbach (Concrete Roots)
Callum McCulloch (The Weavers)

Chair: James Collie

Anna Mansi, director of film and video game certification at the BFI, will present a practical guide to the Audio Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) and Independent Film Tax Credit (IFTC) for documentaries - essential tools for every UK filmmaker to know how to access.

They have worked in the Creative Industries Sectors since 2003. They joined the Certification Unit in 2005 and have expert knowledge of the Cultural Test and Co-production qualification criteria for British Films, High-end television programmes, Animation television programmes, children's television programmes, video games and the UK and EU legislation about the Screen Sector expenditure credits. The Certification Unit is also responsible for the administration of the BFI Diversity Standards for lottery-funded projects.

 In April 2013, they became Head of the Certification Unit when we expanded our remit to take on the qualification processes for High-end Television programmes, Animation programmes and Video Games (2014). In April 2015, the Certification Unit also took on the qualification process for Children's Television. Qualifying projects as British is the gateway to accessing the AVEC & VGEC. Their role encompasses managing a team of 23, providing advice and guidance for the UK’s Screen Sector Expenditure Credits.

They are also responsible for leading the BFI’s engagement with the Video Games sector as part of our 10-year strategy, Screen Culture 2033. They partner with Games London and the London Games Festival for the Screen Play conference and take independent games developers to the First Play Conference in Florence.

Who's out there offering new opportunities to get your documentaries funded and otherwise supported? Hear from some documentary supporters who you may not have otherwise been aware of - what they're looking for, how you can approach them, and what they're excited about in documentaries right now.

Featuring:

Sylvia Bednarz, Managing Director, Grierson Trust

Sylvia Bednarz is Managing Director at the Grierson Trust, which celebrates excellence in documentary filmmaking through the prestigious Grierson Awards. She leads the Trust’s strategy, partnerships and talent initiatives, including DocLab training programmes and Grierson’s free professional development programme supporting freelance documentary filmmakers. Before joining the Grierson Trust, Sylvia worked across the documentary sector in film and TV production, commissioning for online and television, and film festivals. 

Janine Thomas, Assistant Commissioner, BBC Storyville

BBC Storyville Assistant Commissioner, Janine Thomas helps shape and oversee the strand’s award-winning international Docs slate, working closely with Head of Storyville, Nevine Mabro. With a background spanning feature documentaries and current affairs at SKY UK and Channel 4, Thomas has built a strong track record of championing ambitious, impactful filmmaking from both established and emerging voices. She is committed to bringing distinctive stories to new audiences.

James Weddup, Fund Manager for slate development and majority co-production, Global Screen Fund (BFI)

James Weddup is Fund Manager for Slate Development and Majority Co-production at the UK Global Screen Fund within the British Film Institute (BFI). His film experience across twelve years at the BFI covers funding and partnerships in documentary, animation, development labs and new talent, including as Head of BFI NETWORK. He started his career at the Royal National Theatre and British Museum, has worked as a consultant for British Council and Art Fund, and recently spent a year running community engagement programmes on an organic farm.

Harriet Gugenheim,  co-founder and co-director, Placeholder Films

Harriet is co-founder and co-director of Placeholder Films. As an executive producer and financier, she has supported a dozen documentaries including No Other Land, One in a Million and Hollywoodgate. Prior to this, she spent nine years as Director of Philanthropy and Partnerships at Impetus, a venture philanthropy foundation which works to improve education and employment outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the UK. Earlier in her career, Harriet worked in film and television development, with companies such as IWC Media, Talkback Thames and Keo Films. 

Jamie Allan, Talent Development Manager, BFI Doc Society Fund

Jamie Allan leads the Talent Development Programmes for BFI Doc Society. The BFI Doc Society Fund supports and nurtures independent non-fiction film and immersive projects by UK filmmakers, prioritising expansive, director-led storytelling. The BFI Doc Society Fund Talent Development programme is aimed at building connections with documentary filmmakers across all corners of the UK and providing professional development opportunities for filmmakers.

Jamie has a background in documentary filmmaking and was previously the Curator of Artist Film programmes at HOME Manchester and Curator of the Short Film and Community Programmes at Sheffield DocFest.

Chair: Charlie Phillips

Come along to Club Folkestone, have a drink and chat about everything you've heard in the day, ready for an evening and weekend of film viewing!