Sandra Hebron
Sandra Hebron - Artistic Director, Festivals at the BFI - on how the London Film Festival is created anew - philosophically and practically - each year:
"Established 51 years ago, the London Film Festival is the UK's largest public film event, and for two weeks each autumn it attracts public audiences of 120,000 to a programme designed to screen the best in world cinema from the previous 12 months. The festival remit is broad enough to encompass fiction feature films, documentary features, short live action and animation films, artists and experimental work, alongside a programme of master classes, discussions and debates, and a comprehensive range of education screenings and events. It also includes a selection of newly restored films from the world's archives. In addition to its public audiences, the festival also accredits over 2000 press and industry delegates, and welcomes close to 500 directors, writers, producers and actors to present their work. The festival is both a 'festival of festivals' and also committed to discovering new work and supporting new talents.
"With over 600 international film festivals taking place each year, access to information and knowledge is ever more crucial. Festivals occupy a unique position, at the point where film culture and the film industry meet. Balancing the increasing drive and demand for glamour with our firmly held aim to offer access to truly diverse forms of cinema is, for me, not just fascinating in principle but also something which needs to be demonstrated in practice."
Sandra Hebron started her working life as an academic, researching and writing in the fields of cultural studies and sociology, also writing on women, violence and social control, and research methodologies.
She moved from academia to work in independent cinema in the late 1980s, and was Cinemas Director at Manchester's Cornerhouse, before joining the London Film Festival in 1997. She has made a number of short films, was regional development officer for film and photography in Yorkshire, and regularly writes and broadcasts about film.
Sandra Hebron's publications include:
- Women's Leisure, What Leisure? [with Eileen Green and Diana Woodward] (Macmillan, 1990)
- Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and Women's Magazines [with Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham and Elizabeth Frazer] (Palgrave Macmillan, 1991)
