Sheffield’s first festival celebrating the history of working class film is set to take place from 8-10 May at the Showroom Cinema.
The Working Class Film Festival will screen over 35 films of varying lengths and genres, with some entries coming from countries such as Palestine, Ukraine and France.
Festival director Elle Short said: “Eight percent of the workforce within the film and television industry come from a working class background, as opposed to nearly 41% of other workforces defined as working class, so there’s clearly an access issue.
“It’s about trying to send up a signal flare to highlight this issue and to sort of bring on board major stakeholders to try and improve access.”
The festival will recognise diversity within the working class, showing films highlighting intersectionality within race, gender and sexuality. The films will also range in genre, from sci-fi to documentaries.
Ms Short continued: “There’s this stereotype of [working class filmmaking] just being kitchen sink dramas and how bad life is being working class when it’s definitely not that.
“I think it insults the intelligence of working class makers to sort of state that they can only make that work.”
The Working Class Film Festival appears to be one of the first of its kind. Ms Short largely put the festival programme together herself, finding cracks of time between working full time for the ambulance service.
She said: “I’ve been working within the context of film festivals and exhibiting in them for a number of years and there’s, generally speaking, a fairly large cohort of different varieties.
“So it kind of felt strange to find this gap because there’s literally thousands worldwide.”
Since this is the festival’s debut, the key aim for its launch is to create something “honest” to lay foundations for future editions.
They’ve partnered with the Showroom Cinema, who’ve taken on the bulk of marketing.
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Ms Short added that they were trying to make the festival “as economically accessible as possible for people that are working class, rather than it being some sort of thing where it’s only rich people that come and look at it as some sort of cultural oddity.”
She said: “We’re putting it out there that if people tell working class stories, then you might need to involve some working class people.”
You can view The Working Class Film Festival’s programme on the Showroom Cinema website.