Blood Cells. Feature Film

Blood Cells premiered to wide acclaim at the 2014 Venice Film Festival. The film premiered in the UK at the 2015 Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best British Feature Film and alongside a nomination for Best Performance in a British Feature Film for lead Barry Ward. This was followed by a nationwide UK theatrical release, primarily in partnership with Picturehouse Cinemas in addition to organisations including the ICA and BAFTA. This theatrical release was launched with live score screenings at the Hackney and Ritzy cinemas in London. The film was subsequently released on all major VOD platforms worldwide. Its SVOD distribution included Netflix across the English-speaking world. Blood Cells is one of the most widely disseminated creative practice outputs in the history of Teesside University and one of the few <£500K British films ever to receive national theatrical distribution alongside worldwide VOD and SVOD. The film’s primary financier was private sector partner Gucci. Further enterprise partners included Final Cut, Framestore, Panavision, Filmscape and Arri, among others. In addition to the formal and methodological innovations seeded in its screenplay, the film initiated a wave of psychogeographical social realist British cinema set in the contemporary English countryside as evidenced by The Leveling (2016) and God’s Own Country (2017).