Oska Bright Film Festival

Oska Bright is the leading international award winning festival of short films made by, or featuring in lead roles, people with a learning disability. It is produced, managed and presented by a learning disabled team.

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 support learning disabled people to make their own films. The films that were made 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!

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’.