Borderlines Film Festival – Friday 6 to Saturday 21 March 2026

Early in March, the UK’s largest rural film festival spreads its net across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Marches for the 24^th year running. Thanks to funding from the BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, the Elmley Foundation and Hereford City Council, Borderlines Film Festival is able to bring quality and diversity of cinema to this isolated and intensely rural part of the country for 16 whole days.

Expect close to 300 screenings of 70 films for this year’s programme. As ever, the line-up will feature a mix of the best new releases, as well as a large proportion of previews, films screening before their official UK cinema release. Strong awards contenders include Golden Globe winners One Battle After Another (Best picture – musical or comedy; Best Director and Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson), If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Best actress – musical or comedy for Rose Byrne), and The Secret Agent from Brazil (Best picture – non English language; Best actor – drama for Wagner Moura).

Seven out of a total of fifteen titles in the Oscar shortlist for International Feature will be showing at Borderlines, including The President’s Cake (Iraq), No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) from South Korea and Sound of Falling (Germany). Two films in this category, Palestine 36 (Palestine), All That’s Left of You (Jordan) provide historical perspectives on Occupied Palestine, while The Voice of Hind Rajab from (Tunisia) penetrates into the heart of present day Gaza.

As always, there is strong rural representation within the 2026 Borderlines Film Festival programme. Starting with a silent film from 1925, Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life, that follows the spectacular annual spring migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes of Iran, contemporary documentaries explore the sheer diversity of natural life (Super Nature), the effects of climate change in Galicia (Only On Earth), rural farming communities in the American South (Seeds), and the reintroduction of brown bears into the French Pyrenees (The Shepherd and the Bear).

Our Land is a documentary that investigates both sides of the debate around the Right to Roam and its director, Orban Wallace, will be at the festival to introduce the film with a Q&A to follow. There is no shortage of feature films set in rural locations either: DJ Ahmet from North Macedonia, The Love That Remains from Iceland, The Blue Trail from Brazil, and Redoubt from Sweden.

Lighter-hearted offerings at Borderlines Film Festival this year include Is This Thing On?, starring Laura Dern and Will Arnett, a lovely documentary about competitive porridge-making, The Golden Spurtle, and the bittersweet Rental Family, featuring Brendan Foster as an American adrift in Japan.

There’s also a very strong selection of repertory films: two magisterial classics from the 1970s, Coppola’s The Conversation and John Boorman’s Deliverance alongside two superb heist-themed film noirs Gun Crazy and Rififi. Godard’s A Bout de Souffle will play against Richard Linklater’s heady new ‘making of’ film, Nouvelle Vague, and there’s a tribute to the great Italian actress Claudia Cardinale who passed away in September with a screening of The Leopard.

The Open Screen Award showcasing the talents of local filmmakers returns with a prize generously donated by Hereford based John Finch Computers.

Says Naomi Vera-Sanso, Borderlines Film Festival Director, “We love cinema and love sharing exciting new films from across the world that our audiences may not otherwise have an opportunity to see. Even with the immensely loyal core audience that we have built up over twenty-four years, our aim is to reach out further, to different age-groups and demographics.

“A festival generates excitement. Year on year, new people discover the magic that Borderlines can offer and are hooked. And thank you to the BFI and of course National Lottery Players who make this possible.”

2026 sees three new Borderlines venues in Shropshire: the SpArC Theatre in Bishops Castle to the west, Cleobury Mortimer Parish Hall in the east of the county and the new independent arthouse Maona Cinema, housed in the former Kinokulture Community Cinema in Oswestry in the north. All in all, festival screenings cover an area that stretches over 200 square miles.

Screenings in the vicinity of the Malvern Hills area include Castlemorton Parish Hall on the Flicks in the Sticks network, the glorious Art Deco Regal Tenbury Wells, as well as the ever-impressive Malvern Theatres. While undergoing an extensive redevelopment over the next two years that will significantly enhance its facilities, the Theatre’s cinema spaces will host over 80 screenings through the course of the film festival.

The festival brochure with full details of the programme is available to download from the Borderlines website. Printed copies will be posted to mailing list subscribers [sign up at eepurl.com/dwOJH9] and will also be distributed to outlets across our area.

Tickets and passes for the Festival go on sale on Friday 6 February through borderlinesfilmfestival.org and in person or by phone through The Courtyard Hereford (01432 340555) or Malvern Theatres (01684 892277).

Special Presentations:
Media as a Tool for Change: The Rural Media Story – Celebrating 34 years of Rural Media with Nic Millington
A Taste of Britain

Festival Guests:
Orban Wallace, director Our Land
Berwyn Rowlands, Iris Prize Festival Director
Further guests to be confirmed.

What’s On