The British Blacklist
A media platform celebrating the work of UK-based Black creatives and those of the wider Diaspora, across screen, stage, literature and sound.
thebritishblacklist.co.uk
Screening Our Unseen Lives
WHO WE ARE
S.O.U.L. Fest 2025 · Freezeframe Media
S.O.U.L. Fest is a festival of Black British film and television. It began in 2014 as a free quarterly screening series and became an annual festival in 2019. The 2026 edition — our eighth — runs across BFI Southbank, MAC Birmingham, Tyneside Cinema Newcastle and online.
The festival is BAFTA- and BIFA-qualifying, which means the awards we give carry weight beyond the room they are handed out in. We programme in partnership with ABFF London, the European edition of the American Black Film Festival, and BFI Southbank has been our home venue since the beginning.
8
Editions
3
Cities in 2026
7
Award categories
100+
Submissions a year
What the festival does
MORE THAN A SCREENING
Every year we receive well over a hundred short film submissions and programme around eight. Those eight play to full houses in three cities, compete for seven awards, and go on to a windowed run on BFI Player.
Around the films sit the panels, masterclasses and industry sessions — the parts of the festival where a filmmaker meets the person who commissions, represents or hires them. That is the point of the whole exercise. We are not only interested in showing Black British work. We are interested in what happens to the people who made it afterwards.
The collaboration
THREE ORGANISATIONS
We Are Parable
Film exhibition specialists who believe in the storytelling power of events to transform how an audience experiences cinema.
weareparable.comS.O.U.L. Film
A platform working to make British film and television more representative, by connecting Black filmmakers with the audiences and industry that should already know their work.
soulfilm.co.ukThe people
THE TEAM
Eight editions. Three cities. One question, asked every year — who are we allowed to be?
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