….the UK’s only festival of adaptations? I’m not surprised. Last year we had over twenty events, speakers including Booker prize winners and Bafta Winners. Welcome to the blog where we will be keeping you updated with programme news as it breaks as well as giving you a sense of what is so magical about Bridport and this festival.

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First, let’s introduce you to Bridport. There’s no question but that it is all happening in this small, mad West Dorset market town. With film festivals, book festivals, food festivals and hat festivals (and that’s no exaggeration) – there’s something for everyone in the mix. Keep an eye on the blog for more about all these things in the future!

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But for now…. How does the From Page to Screen festival fit in? It’s a question of bringing two key strands together, Film and Books …

With our two beautiful venues: Bridport Arts Centre …

and The Electric Palace an art-deco gem with a funky interior (keep an eye on the blog for a future entry about this incredible building, and primarily, it’s original monster of a projector) Bridport is a natural home to a film festival. We’ve also got the award winning Bridport Film Society which has been showing films here for nearly 50 years, pop-up village cinemas and most recently, the partnership of Curzon Cinemas with the Bridport Arts Centre.

Not only does Bridport love to watch films, it also loves to be used as locations,
Anwar Brett, author of Dorset in Film will be writing
an exclusive article for the blog in the future….

Books and Bridport go together like toast and honey. With four booksellers in the town, the incredible Saturday market stalls poetry reading a regular feature in Bridport pubs, as well as the many authors living in the area, it’s hard to get far in the town without stumbling over something or someone literary.

The Bridport Prize run by the BAC is the largest open creative writing competition in the English Language; it was judged this year by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. No surprise then that we also have two literary festivals, the Bridport Literary Festival  and the Open Book Festival . Bringing film and books together for an event as part of the Bridport Literary Festival in 2009 (a screening of John Fowles’ The Collector) was the first step towards the establishing of From Page to Screen… see the blog for a future interview with the founders of the festival, Steven Horner and Nic Jeune and more about how the festival has evolved over the past four years, to it’s peak last year with BAFTA and Booker Prize winners, Bill Forsyth and Kazuo Ishiguro.

And now, with the Flash Film competition bringing together the prize and the festival – 250 words turned into 60 seconds of film – the festival grows and grows by the year. It’s all about bringing people together to discuss books, film, and film making. As Francine Stock, this year’s guest director of this year’s festival, said in her interview with Jonathan Coe (soon to appear on the blog), “a sort of 3D Book Club”. Could anywhere be better suited to this than Bridport? Keep up with the blog for more on Bridport, the festival and news as it breaks. We’re setting our programme now for what may well be the biggest and best FPTS so far!