THE work of Bradford's City of Film team is being promoted in Japan, where talks are underway on future collaborations in the area of film literacy.

Director of Bradford UNESCO City of Film David Wilson is in Yamagata, where he has been invited to speak at a national cinema conference. He is also meeting film education experts from Japan and South Korea at a special meeting in Tokyo to discuss working with the two countries on film literacy projects. Representatives from Busan - South Korea's City of Film and the country's first city to release a motion picture - will be involved in discussions.

Mr Wilson has been sharing Bradford's experience as a City of Film at the National Conference of Community Cinemas. It is held in Yamagata, which became Japan’s first UNESCO City of Film in October 2017 and was supported by the Bradford team throughout the application stage.

Held annually since 1996, the conference is a place for exchanging news, research findings and discussion among those involved in film in Japan. Attendees include people interested in screening films, cultural programming and activities linked to community cinema such as movie theatres, film festivals, cinematheques and film societies, as well as distributors, filmmakers and students.

Mr Wilson said: "It was a great honour to be invited as a guest speaker. There was a mutual exchange of ideas on film education and building future film audiences. I look forward to welcoming colleagues from the Japanese cinema sector to Bradford to discuss some of this."

Film producer Steve Abbot, chairman of Bradford City of Film, added: “We are immensely proud of Bradford’s achievements in film literacy since becoming the world’s first UNESCO City of Film in 2009.

"Part of our ongoing commitment to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCNN) is to share good practice with other cities and to learn from them in the process. David is a great ambassador for Bradford and has developed a leading role within the film cities cluster in particular, but also has great respect from the rest of the network, which now includes 180 cities from 72 countries. The Bradford Film Literacy programme has developed over a number of years in partnership with the British Film Institute and Bradford’s Curriculum Innovation Centre. In recent years the Bradford City of Film team have also worked with a number of community groups and community cinemas, adapting some of the basic principles of the film literacy work and applying them to a community setting. ”

The UCCN was created in 2004 to link cities where creativity is a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. The cities work together towards placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of development plans at a local level and co-operating actively at international level.