The Isle of Man Film Festival held a pre-launch event on Thursday 10th March to officially release its September dates, launch its new website and to provide supporters, press and sponsors details of their early plans for the 2016 schedule.

Organisers screened a highlights video of the 2015 festival, which included a summary of the year’s events plus interviews with BBC film reviewer and friend of the festival Mark Kermode, last year’s special guest Sir John Hurt and some of the visiting filmmakers.

The pre-launch event took place at the beautiful Victoria Chambers office of Laurence Keenan Advocates & Solicitors who they are pleased to announce as one of their 2016 sponsors. Enjoying the evening along with members of the IOMFF team were local business people, government and media representatives. National station, Manx Radio have also kindly offered support this year by making IOMFF 2016 one of their association programmes and will support the event with its full range of commercial, broadcast, online and social media facilities.

The organisers are confident that they are on track to obtain a greater reach and even bigger success for the events, which will be held at various venues around the Island. The Claremont Hotel will be the IOMFF16 social hub, and events are planned for the Gaiety Theatre and Broadway Cinema, as well as smaller locations such as the Bath & Bottle, Patchwork Cafe in Port St Mary, and The Trafalgar Hotel in Ramsey.

Isle of Man Film Festival Director Zoe Guilford said:

“We want to build more local interest in the festival this year. Our international short film competition is attracting more visitors to the Island - which is brilliant for our reputation - but we’d love to engage more of the Manx public too.”

The 10th March also marked the opening of the Isle of Man Film Festival’s international short film competition. The festival received over one hundred entries when it opened up to global submissions in 2015 and expectations are high for more films this year.

This year sees the return of film critic Mark Kermode who will host the festival’s main events. French artist and proud Manx resident Bruno Cavellec is also back on board to create the poster design for 2016. The festival hopes to build on the success of last year with great events, brilliant special guests, and more fun film stuff going on around the Island.

For more information, please contact Zoe Guilford zoe@isleofmanfilmfestival.com. 

Photo - Some of Film festival team, launch hosts and festival sponsors from left to right. Dave Armstrong, Zoe Guilford, Laurence Keenan, Anne Keenan (both sponsors/hosts), Richard Hird, Christy DeHaven, Laura Gill.