On the set of an independent feature production a few years ago, two Birmingham filmmakers — Paul and Dean — got to the end of a long day and started talking about what came next. Streaming service? Distribution deal? Festival circuit?
Then a specific question surfaced: there's a Coventry Film Festival and a Southend Film Festival. Why isn't there a Birmingham Film Festival?
They dug into it. A festival had run in Birmingham during the 1990s, but it was a different shape — screenings rather than a proper festival. Paul, Dean, and their co-founder Kevin had been to Cannes and other industry festivals. They knew what a festival could do for the working filmmakers in a region. Birmingham didn't have one. So they built one.
Zebra Home Cinema hosted the Birmingham Film Festival team at their Zebra Spotlight studio to walk through the story: why the festival exists, what it does for the region, why Birmingham has quietly become a serious filming destination, and why a 13-year-old shooting a vlog on her phone can walk away with a BFF award alongside veteran filmmakers in their eighties.
Who Founded the Birmingham Film Festival
The festival was founded by Paul, Dean, and Kevin — working filmmakers who had been making independent features and short films in the West Midlands and had experienced first-hand how thin the local festival infrastructure was for emerging British filmmakers.
Their brief for the festival was different from the alternatives:
- ▪Not a retrospective. Plenty of other events screen the best of David Lean or revive beloved classics. BFF doesn't compete in that lane.
- ▪Not only screenings. A proper festival has networking, industry panels, connection between emerging talent and established industry, and a clear recognition framework through awards.
- ▪Not only local. Although the festival's heart is in Birmingham and the West Midlands, the vision from day one has been an international festival based in Birmingham — bringing international talent into the city and out again, not a closed-circle regional screening.
"It's just about the talent wherever it is, and bringing it into the region — because we really want to put a shot in the arm for the media industry in this region."
The founders specifically wanted a platform for filmmakers who were making things but didn't yet have the profile to get distribution or streaming attention. The festival is both a showcase for that work and a community for the people doing it.
"If You're Going to Make It, Make It in Birmingham"
Early in the festival's existence — before the first edition had even run — Stephen Knight (the writer and creator of Peaky Blinders, one of the most consequential UK television exports of the last decade, and himself Birmingham-born) agreed to lend his support. He sat for an interview with the BFF team that helped kick the momentum off.
Knight delivered a line in that interview that stuck. It became the festival's motto.
"If you're going to make it, make it in Birmingham."
That sentence, simple as it is, captures the festival's core claim: Birmingham is not a place you settle for because you can't afford London. It is a place where the craft of filmmaking can be done at a meaningful international level, with local infrastructure, local talent, and an increasingly compelling pipeline of visiting productions taking the city seriously.
Why Birmingham Has Become a Filming Destination
The festival didn't create Birmingham's emergence as a filming destination, but it has helped elevate and publicise it. In the last few years, major productions have been quietly shooting in the city:
- ▪Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg) — Birmingham doubled for the Columbus, Ohio rooftops. The Rotunda was digitally removed and a villain's headquarters inserted in its place. Sharp-eyed viewers spot the back of Primark in the aerial sequences.
- ▪Mission: Impossible — Tom Cruise filming sequences in the West Midlands, with parts of the production moving from a planned international location to Birmingham after COVID disrupted the original schedule.
- ▪Kingsman: The Golden Circle — closed off Birmingham city centre for a major sequence, because the cost and logistics of a similar shut-down around Hyde Park would have been several times higher.
- ▪Dark Money (BBC) — a mini-series whose director specifically chose Birmingham for location scouting reasons: the city is compact enough to visit eight locations in a single day, where London would have required scheduling across a week.
The factors making Birmingham attractive to visiting productions are consistent:
| Factor | London | Birmingham |
|---|---|---|
| Average crew cost | Higher | ~30–40% lower typical |
| Street closure permits | Expensive, slow, red-tape-heavy | Relatively fast and pragmatic |
| Location scouting density | Sprawling, travel-time heavy | Compact, 8 locations easily in a day |
| Hotel and catering costs | Premium central rates | Meaningful saving |
| Architectural variety | Saturated / over-exposed | Underrepresented on screen |
The Birmingham advantage is compound. It's not just cheaper — it's easier, faster, and more architecturally interesting than the capital for productions that want a British city backdrop without the London tax.
The Peaky Blinders effect amplifies all of this. A generation of international producers and directors now associate Birmingham with a specific gritty, cinematic grammar that Peaky Blinders established globally. Productions arriving for the first time find a city whose on-screen identity has already been set up for them.
The Missing Birmingham Film Studio
The one missing piece of Birmingham's film infrastructure is a serious studio complex.
"Netflix has taken over Pinewood. Disney's taken over Elstree — or the other way around. They're opening film studios all over the country and they're booked up by the studios for a couple of years to film stuff. If we built one I don't think it'd struggle for business."
The economics are there. Streaming platforms are operating at permanent production capacity — Netflix alone books years of studio slots ahead. A serious studio complex in or around Birmingham, with proper sound stages, facilities, and infrastructure, would have demand queued up on opening day.
The founders' observation, half-joking: a Birmingham studio may arrive on roughly the same timeline as HS2. Translation: the opportunity is real, the political and commercial will to commit to it is not yet visible.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Birmingham — possibly rather than in the centre — is the obvious location. If it happens, it will transform the regional industry further. If it doesn't, Birmingham will remain a filming destination served by London-based infrastructure, which is still an improvement on the status quo a decade ago.
Who Wins at the Birmingham Film Festival
The festival's awards categories are deliberately inclusive. The team's conviction is that a festival is only as good as the range of work it celebrates, and that emerging filmmakers at any life stage deserve recognition alongside established industry figures.
The main category groupings:
- ▪Best Feature Film
- ▪Best Short Film
- ▪Student Film Award — work produced during formal film study
- ▪First-Time Filmmaker Award — a category that explicitly does not assume "first-time" means "young"
- ▪Young Filmmaker Award — for emerging filmmakers at the start of their careers
- ▪Young Actor / Young Actress Awards — recognition for emerging performance talent
The split between First-Time Filmmaker and Young Filmmaker is considered. Not every first-time filmmaker is in their twenties. Some people take up filmmaking later in life, after other careers. The festival wants both categories represented because the craft doesn't belong only to those who entered it early.
At the other end of the spectrum, the festival has regular submissions from filmmakers well into later life. The team mentioned a filmmaker named Howard — in his 80s — who has submitted six films to the current year's festival and submitted eight the previous year. Sheer prolific output at that age, the team said, deserves recognition regardless of genre.
"Everyone in that room has, at least from our point of view, been acknowledged as something worthy of seeing — something good and talented. We reject a lot of really good stuff as well because we have to. So if you're in that room, you could win something, but you're already in our eyes a winner."
Films Shot on Phones — And Still Shown on a Big Screen
One of the most memorable moments the festival's founders described was the premiere of a vlog-style short film shot entirely on a mobile phone by a 13-year-old girl. The film had a brilliant closing punchline (the team declined to spoil it, in case it's still out there to be discovered). It won an award. The 13-year-old was invited on stage.
"It was similar to the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner kind of feel. She'd shot this film on her phone. And when she won the award, I was dead chuffed. It was such a great piece of work from such a young filmmaker."
This is the festival's broader point about access. The barriers to entry for filmmaking have collapsed. A phone camera and a clear voice can produce award-quality work. The festival projects every selected submission — including phone-shot films — on the biggest screen outside of London in the UK, because the work deserves to be seen in its finished scale regardless of capture format.
There is a tension here worth naming: seeing a film shot on a phone on a 20-metre screen is not always flattering to the film. The team acknowledged this with a laugh — you see everything. But the discipline of showing every selected film at that scale is deliberate. A filmmaker who watches their own work projected that big learns more about their filmmaking in ninety minutes than they would in a year of local screenings.
The Gala Awards Night — Red Carpet and Relief
The festival's annual Gala Awards Night is its emotional peak. Dicky bows, red carpet, photographers, the full event calibration. The nominated films have already been filtered down from a much larger submission pool. Every filmmaker in the room has, in the organisers' view, been tacitly recognised already.
For the founders, the Gala is also the point at which a year of festival-building pressure releases.
"Once everybody's through the door at the Gala, I finally relax. And yeah — we did it again. Anything else after that is a bonus. So the Gala's a real highlight emotionally for us."
It's worth considering what a festival Gala is actually for. Most festival awards nights are about industry networking, PR, and brand visibility. The Birmingham Film Festival Gala is those things, but it's also something more intimate: a room full of people who collectively represent the current generation of British filmmaking at this specific scale. Student filmmakers. First-time feature directors. Eighty-year-olds who've submitted their sixth film of the year. Young actors with business cards. Casting directors. Industry crew. The founders. The winners. The runners-up.
The festival closes with everyone who made something in the last year in one room. That's rare enough in the industry to matter.
Key Takeaways
- ▪The Birmingham Film Festival is an annual international film festival founded by Paul, Dean, and Kevin — working filmmakers from Birmingham who noticed the city didn't have a proper festival and built one. It is deliberately positioned as a platform for emerging and working filmmakers rather than a retrospective.
- ▪The festival's motto — "If you're going to make it, make it in Birmingham" — was coined by Stephen Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, in an early interview with the festival team.
- ▪Birmingham has become a serious UK filming destination in the last decade, attracting major productions including Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg), Mission: Impossible, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and Dark Money (BBC). The draw is compound: lower costs than London, easier street-closure permits, compact location scouting, and architectural underrepresentation giving directors visual novelty.
- ▪The one missing piece of the city's film infrastructure is a major studio complex. Demand would be immediate given Netflix and Disney's saturation of Pinewood and Elstree, but the opportunity hasn't yet been jumped on.
- ▪The festival's award categories are deliberately inclusive — student, first-time, young, and lifetime categories — because filmmaking doesn't belong to any single demographic. Submissions range from 13-year-old phone-shot vlogs to an 80-year-old filmmaker named Howard who has submitted over a dozen films across recent festivals.
- ▪The festival projects every selected submission on the biggest screen outside of London in the UK. Even films shot on mobile phones are shown at full theatrical scale, because the work deserves it — and because the scale reveals craft quality faster than any other viewing format.
- ▪The annual Gala Awards Night is the festival's emotional peak and its founders' personal relief. Every filmmaker in the room has been tacitly recognised as notable; a percentage leave with formal awards.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded the Birmingham Film Festival?
Paul, Dean, and Kevin — working Birmingham filmmakers who realised the city lacked a proper film festival after working on an independent feature. They built the festival to platform emerging filmmakers in the West Midlands and bring international talent into the region.
When is the Birmingham Film Festival?
The festival runs annually. Submissions open well in advance, with the festival itself typically taking place in late autumn each year. Current dates and submission windows are available on the festival's official site.
How do I submit a film to the Birmingham Film Festival?
Via the festival's official website at www.BirminghamFilmFestival.com or through the festival's social channels (@TheBhamFilmFest on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook). The festival selects submissions across multiple categories including feature film, short film, student film, first-time filmmaker, young filmmaker, and young actor/actress.
Why has Birmingham become a filming destination?
A combination of factors: meaningful cost savings compared with London; faster and more pragmatic street-closure permits; a compact city area that allows location scouting to visit multiple sites in a single day; and architectural novelty for directors fatigued by London's saturation. The visibility of Peaky Blinders has amplified Birmingham's on-screen identity in the global production community.
What films have been shot in Birmingham recently?
Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018) used Birmingham rooftops and streets doubling for Columbus, Ohio. Mission: Impossible has shot sequences in the region. Kingsman: The Golden Circle closed off the city centre for a sequence. Dark Money (BBC, 2019) was shot locally. Peaky Blinders is set in Birmingham, though filmed partly in Liverpool and Manchester for production reasons.
What was Stephen Knight's connection to the festival?
Stephen Knight — the writer and creator of Peaky Blinders and a Birmingham native — supported the festival early on, giving a pre-festival interview that generated initial momentum. The festival's motto — "If you're going to make it, make it in Birmingham" — came from that interview and has been the BFF mantra ever since.
What award categories does the Birmingham Film Festival offer?
Best Feature Film, Best Short Film, Student Film Award, First-Time Filmmaker Award, Young Filmmaker Award, Young Actor, and Young Actress — alongside additional craft and genre awards announced each year. The separation between First-Time Filmmaker and Young Filmmaker is deliberate, recognising that first-time filmmakers can be any age.
Can I use a phone to make a film for submission?
Yes. The festival has previously awarded phone-shot films. The founders project all selected submissions on the biggest screen outside of London in the UK, regardless of capture format, because the work deserves to be seen at theatrical scale. A strong story told well on a phone competes with any other format.
