Daisies (1966)BFI Player partners with UK regional cinemas to give UK audiences an extended free trial and tailored access to the best of British and global cinema through BFI Player while venues are closed to the public. Broadway, Nottingham; Glasgow Film Theatre; HOME Manchester; Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast; Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle; and Watershed, Bristol – all cinemas which lead regional Hubs as part of the BFI Film Audience Network – are offering their audiences curated programmes from BFI Player plus a four week free trial.
The partnerships give regional audiences an extended free trial of BFI Player’s subscription service, with a collection recommended especially for them by their trusted cinema programmers. For many, this also includes a rich and varied programme of archive content – specific to their respective regions – which is part of BFI Player’s free year round offer.
Ben Luxford, Head of UK Audiences at the BFI, said:
Everyone is feeling the impact of this crisis and we wanted to find a way to ensure audiences across the UK could still feel connected to their venues, and continue to discover a brilliant selection of films. BFI Player is fantastic, so an exclusive extended free trial is always great news, but what makes this offer to audiences really special is their local venue programmers expertly creating collections of features and archive content especially for them.”
Jason Wood, Creative Director: Film and Culture at HOME and Visiting Professor at MMU and Visiting Professor at University of Salford, said:
HOME has an intrinsic relationship with the BFI and the opportunity to collaborate with them on their BFI Player service is a natural extension of that. The HOME film team were able to curate a short selection which was an almost impossible task given the breadth and diversity of the titles available through the Player. I can vouch for the fact that our audiences have really appreciated being able to maintain access to a wider and deeper cinema culture. Partnerships keep the cinema flame alive and help to ensure that it is still burning in what will hopefully soon be a post-COVID-19 landscape.”
The free trial, which can be up to six weeks if users can combine the Player’s standard 14 day trial, plus an additional four weeks through these new partnerships, give audiences full access to the BFI’s subscription streaming service, a superior collection of new releases, classics and collections personally curated by the likes of Tilda Swinton and Mark Kermode. From the UK’s national and regional archives, thousands of free films include an extensive collection dedicated to our heroic NHS, and the Britain on Film map, which has been viewed by more than 75 million users since its launch in 2015 and provides hours of discoveries about people and places all over the UK.