Thirty-one years young, Encounters Film Festival is returning to Bristol from Wednesday 23 September to Sunday 27 September for its most ambitious programme yet. Among the 70-plus premieres, cross-disciplinary experiences and live events is the UK premiere of Sirāt Live, a screening of Oliver Laxe’s acclaimed film alongside an AV club experience from soundtrack composer and DJ Kangding Ray at Prospect Building on Thursday 24 September.
We spoke to the festival’s executive director, Dave Taylor-Matthews, about this year’s festival, its focus on breakthrough and discovery and what the future holds.
Encounters has been an acclaimed short film festival since 1995; this year, the programme has expanded with some stellar premieres. Has the focus shifted?
The festival’s been going for over three decades now, a lot longer than I’ve been here – a lot longer than anyone currently involved has been here – and over those years the programming has shifted many times.
We’ve had huge names come through Bristol before: Matt Groening, Hayao Miyazaki, and in 2017 we welcomed Pierre Coffin, the animator who created and voices the Minions, one of the biggest animated franchises in the world. We hosted a special screening of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank nearly 20 years ago when it first came out, with Andrea serving on the jury here after winning our Grand Prix a couple of years before. So bringing big names and premieres to the programme isn’t new, it’s a return to something the festival has always been capable of, and it’s certainly something we’ll look to do more of in the future if Bristol and the region want us to.
At its heart, Encounters has always been about the moment of breakthrough and discovery, and that continues to run through everything. When I look into the archives I see lovely videos and photos of fresh-faced young people who are now big film directors. There are tons of people who started at Encounters as volunteers straight out of university and are now in senior positions at places like the BFI, BBC and Channel 4, or working as creative directors at studios, doing incredible things. Whether it’s a filmmaker taking their first real steps into the industry, or an audience member discovering the world of film festivals for the first time, Encounters is such an inspirational place for people to come and start to feel at home in an industry that can otherwise feel so removed.
What does breakthrough and discovery mean nowadays?
The screen industries look completely different from how they did 30 years ago, with streaming, high-end TV, the creator economy… So we’re trying to take a step back and look at what breakthrough and discovery really mean now, and reflect that across the whole programme.
Take a film like Sirat. Oliver Laxe is a critically acclaimed director with an incredible body of work behind him, but we feel like Sirat represented a real moment of breakthrough with audiences last year, and particularly with audiences here in Bristol. More people saw it at Watershed than at any other cinema in the country. And when you think about Bristol’s sound system culture and how deeply music runs through this city, it makes sense that this film connected here the way it did. So programming a live performance of Sirat, with Kangding Ray performing the score, feels like exactly the right story for us to be telling.
Then you’ve got Mission, a new feature from Early Day Films, who have a long history with the festival going back to Mark Jenkin’s Bait – and beyond. The cast and crew will be joining us for the screening, and it’s the first time the film will play on English soil.
We’re also playing Bad Apples, starring Saoirse Ronan, whose director Jonatan Etzler has recorded a lovely special introduction for us this year. Jonatan first came to Bristol in 2015 for Encounters, his first and only visit to the city before returning to shoot his feature here. He says he fell in love with Bristol on that trip. We’re also premiering Saoirse’s own directorial debut as a short filmmaker, alongside 70-odd other premieres. These are all breakthrough moments at different scales.
We’re ten years on from Brexit, we’ve been through the pandemic, and Bristol’s creative industries are now entering a really exciting period. More and more incredible TV, film and screen-based work is being produced here. Encounters has a job to reflect that scene on the international stage, and this year’s programme is a step towards doing that properly.
What are the key overarching themes of this year’s festival?
There are a few threads running through this year’s programme. One is looking at how filmmaking is changing and where the next generation of filmmakers are coming from. We’re screening work by people like Wesley Wang and Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms online shorts led to a deal with A24, alongside films from more traditional routes. We’re interested in what that creator-to-cinema pipeline looks like and what it means for the industry.
Another thread is music and film. Bristol is a music city, so we’re leaning into that with our Sirat Live AV show and with Warp Vision at the old IMAX, along with talks with Geoff Barrow and Kangding Ray about composing for screen. There’s a really natural connection between Bristol’s music culture and what we do, and we want to explore that more.
Then there’s access and participation, particularly for children and families. Our screenPLAY strand makes a case for healthy, creative screen engagement. We’ve got a claymation workshop, a family gaming room and a special screening of Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, where children and families can ask questions of the team who made it. We’re also giving kids a chance to help select a winner for one of our international film prizes, which is about showing them that their opinion and voice matter.
What are your own highlights from this year’s programme?
Having seen the incredible short films that are in the programme, I cannot wait to see them with an audience. They’re funny, they’re scary, they’re moving and they’re all extraordinary. We’re thrilled to be able to play all of them, but the one thing we haven’t done yet is watch them with a crowd – that’s when the magic really happens. So any of our international competition screenings are always an absolute highlight for me.
In terms of the headline events, I am excited to see Mission with a crowd. People sometimes talk about how we don’t produce enough independent features here in Bristol, and this is the latest from Kate Byers and Linn Waite at Early Day Films, whose work is always amazing. We’ve got a long history with Paul Wright, the director.
As someone who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, I cannot wait to see Warp Vision, with all those incredible music videos from Warp Records up on Bristol’s biggest screen. It’s going to be really face-melting. And of course, there’s Oliver Laxe VJing live visuals to Kangding Ray’s incredible music with a massive sound system. That’s another UK first. And for our closing night party at Wake the Tiger, we’ve got some really wicked DJs; it’s going to be a real party. Wake the Tiger is an incredible venue. I’ve only ever been during the daytime, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like at night.
I’m also really pleased that we’re able to bring in more families this year. I think it’s really important that we start to get our heads around what good, healthy screen time looks like for kids, and what our relationship with screens really is. As a father, I know how important that is to parents and to children, and how much of an impact screens have on our lives.
What are your aims for the festival moving forward?
I’m a Bristolian. I love this city and I think we deserve a really incredible, exciting film festival that celebrates all of the amazing stuff across the screen industries, the stuff that everybody is talking about and the stuff that blows people’s minds. Bristol is known for doing it differently and we will always try our best to keep things accessible and friendly where other festivals can be intimidating and exclusive.
We don’t want to lose our focus. We’re always going to be about that moment of discovery and about breakthrough. But we think Encounters should be the number one place to come in the UK for the really exciting stuff, the stuff that’s going to be blowing people’s minds in six months, in five years, in ten years down the line.
Encounters Film Festival 2026 runs from 23-27 September
