Inside the room for the Stockholm industry screening

This weekend a selection of films from the Stafford Film Festival screens in Stockholm. It is a private industry screening for distributors and industry professionals and it is not open to the public, so most of you will never see the inside of the room. Above is the room, and below is the rest of it.

Small on purpose

The instinct, when you are proud of a programme, is to want the biggest room you can fill. For this screening that instinct is wrong. Nobody in Stockholm is buying a ticket. Every seat is going to someone whose job involves deciding what gets distributed, and a room this size means there is no back row to hide in and no crowd to disappear into afterwards.

The seating is raked in two blocks with a lit staircase up the middle, which sounds like a detail until you have watched people try to leave a flat floored screening quietly. Everyone can see the screen without negotiating around the head in front, and everyone can get out and back in without the room noticing.

The bit that is not the film

That standing table by the screen is doing more work than it looks like it is. At a public screening the value sits in the Q&A. At an industry screening it sits in the twenty minutes afterwards, when people are still in the room and still thinking about what they have just watched. The lighting comes up warm rather than white for exactly that reason. A room that snaps to full brightness at the end of a film empties in ninety seconds.

What this means for selected filmmakers

Nothing is required of you. If your film is in the Stockholm selection you have already been told, and there is no additional material to send and no fee of any kind. If your film is not in it, that is a programming decision about what suits this particular audience, and it says nothing about the work.

We are not going to overpromise on outcomes. A screening puts work in front of people; it does not conjure a distribution deal. What we can say is that the people in these seats are the ones who could take a film further, and that getting them into a room together is a large part of the point of running a festival at all.

Stockholm again, in public

Further Stockholm screenings open to the public are intended. Nothing is booked and we are not going to pretend otherwise, but when something is arranged it will be announced on the newsletter before anywhere else.

The UK screening is separate and comes later: provisionally Sunday 6 September 2026 at the Mitchell Arts Centre in Stoke-on-Trent, awaiting final confirmation. Details for both are on the 2026 festival page.