Actor Wil Johnson will host the opening night of the 7th British Urban Film Festival in October, the producers of BUFF 2012 have announced.  Johnson, whose previous film and TV credits include “Waking the Dead”, “Waterloo Road” and “Babymother”, will be making his debut as festival presenter having previously featured in starring roles at BUFF in the films ‘Disoriented Generation’ and ‘Colour Blind’.    SERTUC Film Club, which has agreed...

The much maligned profile of Black British actresses has been well documented on this blog over the past 18 months and most recently in the London Evening Standard with the forthcoming feel-good flick ‘Fast Girls’ and the supposed significance of Leonora Crichlow playing the lead role in a British film. On such matters is primarily where Twitter comes into its own as a live news editor run by the public. It doesn’t take long before feedback is immediate and corrected (many thanks to @ECF...

The first month of Olympic year in London has not failed to disappoint in terms of celebrating the best of British. At the time of publication of this blog came news that the network television premiere of ‘Sus’ – co-produced by and starring Clint Dyer attracted 600,000 viewers on BBC 1, dominating all TV viewing at the time of broadcast (which at 11.15pm is quite impressive). Previous BUFF blogs and the festival in general have championed the likes of films like ‘Sus’ and will conti...

“Charles Thompson is a Godsend. I’m fortunate to have started out in media under the tutelage of Charles almost a decade ago now. I was there when Screen Nation was in its infancy and I’m privileged to still be a part of it all albeit as a supporter of this year’s event where another of my mentors (Menelik Shabazz) will be rightly honoured also. I have a lot of time for Charles who in turn has shown a lot of time for me and for so many people in the film industry who would’ve taken g...

Mr Geoff Small, Mr Stephen Lloyd Jackson, Mr Yves Brodsky, Ms Sonja Phillips, Ms Jane Sanchez-Gull, Mr Aml Ameen, Mr Cassius Matthias, Mr Lyndon Ives, Mr Harold Chapman, Ms Ida Akesson, Ms Beth Parkes, Mr Richard Bond, Mr Ben Miller, and Mr Paris Leonti. Having saluted our 16 shortlisted filmmakers BUFF would like to thank all of those other talented filmmakers who’ve submitted their entries for festival consideration – it has been a privilege to watch them all. We would also like t...

Who would be a media mogul ey? The last few weeks and months has seen the likes of Simon Cowell and Rupert Murdoch become the story for the wrong reasons. For months, the press were told who was in and who was out in the game of musical chairs regarding this year’s X Factor judges. Eventually we said goodbye to Danni Minogue and Cheryl Cole and hello to Kelly Rowland and Tulisa Contostavlos (Peter Dickson, the voice of X-Factor will certainly have his hands full announcing her name in full e...

Over the past 12 months, BUFF has invited filmmakers and journalists to offer their thoughts and experiences of the industry. Now its’ my turn. In what has been a year of exciting developments, BUFF was the first media outlet to announce the winners of the Film London Best of Boroughs awards – one of whom submitted their entry into the British Urban Film Festival only weeks before. The awards just happened to take place in the same week it was announced that the UK Film Council was to be...

This month's edition is guest-written by Jessie Grace Mellor, previously the resident film reviewer for The Daily Mirror and now director of 'N-Dubz - The Way We Were', one of this year's BUFF UK premieres... During this blog about my experiences with BUFF, I’m going to flit between a few different timelines. A time machine won’t be required but please bear with me. I’m gonna start in 2005. I had just finished my short mockumentary ‘Billy Blaze’ and was eag...

The British Urban Film Festival 2010 4th, 5th, 6th September  For immediate release Chairman's formal announcement The British Urban Film Festival returns. The annual 3-day event which is free to all ages kicks off on Saturday 4th September at Tottenham’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre – named after the black Labour politician who was MP for the area for over a decade. The stage play-turned-movie “Sus”, starring Clint Dyer, Rafe Spall & Ralph Brown, will be screened on the opening nig...

For immediate release:  After the success of last year’s event, organisers of the 2009 British Urban Film Festival (BUFF for short) are to once again offer free tickets to the public in what’s been dubbed ‘credit crunch cinema’, part of its’ strategy to capitalise on the growing interest in urban independent film and making it accessible to the public at large. Launched last December when the credit crunch began to hit people financially, over 400 people took advantage of free tic...