Oska Bright

In 2000, Junk TV (www.junk-tv.com), a youth and community film production company, and Carousel (www.carousel.org.uk), a learning disabled arts charity (charity number 297201), began working together to help learning disabled people make their own films. The films they helped people make were animated films and were very colourful and fun to watch.By 2003 quite a few films had been made but it was very difficult to find any cinemas or film festivals to show the films to people. After speaking to Screen South, Arts Council England and a number of local production companies Carousel and Junk TV decided to organise a small scale event to show the new films.They supported a group of learning disabled artists and film makers to set up the Oska Bright Festival steering committee, that’s us. We do all the organising. The first job we did was to decide a name for the event, we decided to call it ‘Oska Bright Film Festival’. We also decided to turn the event into a National Festival, and before long we had secured start up funding from Mencap.The festival had an award ceremony and winners were able to take their awards away and keep them as a mark of their achievement. After the second festival in 2005 we decided it would be a good idea to take the films ‘On the Road’ so that more people would get the chance to see them. We decided that it would also be good to help more learning disabled people to find out how to make films, we did this by making a master class in film making which would tour with the festival on the road. So now Oska Bright film festival happens every two years and when there isn’t a festival we take the films and the workshop ‘On the Road’.