The story behind this new festival by Dan Champion Founder of The Ipswich International Film Festival.

For too long, conversations about film have been dominated by the familiar, the biggest releases and the safest stories. Yet cinema has always belonged just as much to the artists who refuse convention, the pioneers who invent new languages of storytelling, the rebels who challenge audiences to see the world differently. It is from this belief that the Ipswich International Film Festival is born.

The festival welcomes Academy Award-winning filmmaker Mat Kirkby and acclaimed documentary filmmaker Sophie Fiennes as its inaugural Festival Patrons, with veteran film producer Richard Johns serving as Executive Producer. Together, they represent the creative curiosity and independent spirit at the heart of the festival.

Operated by Ipswich Film Theatre Trust, a not-for-profit, and running 31 October – 14 November 2026 at King Street Cinema, the inaugural festival lands with a single guiding idea: Misfits + Outsiders. Across two weeks, UK premieres, major restorations, cult classics, documentaries, filmmaker conversations, archive discoveries and special guests will explore the people and stories that exist beyond the mainstream.

The programme reflects that philosophy at every turn, celebrating cinema’s glorious margins from 35mm presentations of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, to conversations with filmmakers Sophie Fiennes, Howard Berry and Adam Gee, and acclaimed behind-the-scenes author, Jay Glennie. And through tributes to uncompromising filmmakers including Bette Gordon, John Waters, René Laloux and Rosa von Praunheim, the programme champions artists whose work has expanded the possibilities of the medium.

Mojo Lorwin’s remarkable Moi-Même, receiving its UK Premiere at Ipswich International Film Festival, bridges more than half a century of filmmaking, completing footage first shot amid the political upheaval of Paris in May 1968. It is both an act of cinematic archaeology and a moving reflection on artistic inheritance, reminding us that great films are often unfinished conversations between generations.

The centenary of Marilyn Monroe is marked with a new 4K restoration of The Misfits, John Huston’s elegiac masterpiece about dreamers, drifters and those unable to find a place within modern America. Contemporary voices are equally celebrated through Vincent Munier’s breathtaking Whispers in the Woods and Sophie Heldman’s The Education of Jane Cumming, screening in a preview two months before the film’s release.

Ipswich has long been a town with a rich cultural history, but the arrival of an international film festival signals something more than another event on the calendar. It represents confidence in cinema as an art form, in audiences as curious participants, and in the belief that the most enthralling stories are often found at the edges rather than the centre.