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Barbican Young Film Programmers


Barbican Young Film Programmers (Course Leader, 2015–2023)


Between 2015 and 2023, I served as Course Leader for the Barbican Young Film Programmers, a seven-month training programme in film curation and event production. I designed and led the curriculum, providing participants aged 16–25 with hands-on experience in programming, marketing, and delivering public film events.

At the heart of the programme, I founded the Chronic Youth Film Festival, an annual event entirely curated and produced by the students, hosted by the Barbican Centre. The festival became both a platform for emerging curatorial voices and a launchpad for diverse, inclusive film culture in London.

As lead mentor, I worked alongside Barbican curators and guest tutors from across the industry to guide participants in developing creative confidence, critical insight, and collaborative skills. Each cohort programmed, marketed, and delivered their own festival weekend — learning every stage of the process from idea to audience.

Graduates of the programme now work at MUBI, ICA, Open City Documentary Festival, and across major London venues. Others have founded innovative collectives such as Tape Collective, Brixton Community Cinema, and new curatorial projects at the BFI and Barbican — continuing the programme’s legacy of empowerment and independent thinking.


The Young Programmers 2020 collectively comment:

'We are united by our collective emotional response and desire to share these films with the world!

In these trying times we selected these titles based on their depiction of people coming together and looking for joy in the most unlikely circumstances.

We are championing cinema that portrays the power of change on a personal and local level.'



FILMS LISTS:
Chronic Youth Festival 2016
Chronic Youth Festival 2017
Chronic Youth Festival 2018
Chronic Youth Festival 2019
Chronic Youth Festival 2020
Chronic Youth Festival 2021
Chronic Youth Festival 2022
Chronic Youth Festival 2023 
 





2016
Chronic Youth highlights

Güeros - Alonzo Ruizpalacios

Rude Boy - Jack Hazan

Mediterranea - Jonas Carpignano


2017
Chronic Youth highlights

Tower XYZ
Ayo Akingbade

Something Better to Come - Hanna Polak

Swagger - Olivier Babinet

Millenium Mambo - 
Hou Hsiao-Hsein &
Mia Hansen Love shorts








2018
Chronic Youth highlights

Summer 1993 Carla Simón

A Child in the Crowd - Gérard Blain 





2019
Chronic Youth highlights


Young Soul Rebels - Isaac Julien

Archive Films

Zine 








Barbican Young Programmer
Araba talking about 
Young Soul Rebels 


The Smalls video of the BYP 2019





Autumn 2020

3 & 4 October in Cinema - 3-13 October online : get your tickets!

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/series/chronic-youth-film-festival-2020

Screentalk about Q’s Barbershop
https://youtu.be/5qY2yxD0cPA



Spring 2022
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/series/chronic-youth-film-festival-2022



Emerging Curators 


Course Concept 

I devised and ran the Emerging Curators Lab following on from my expertise at running the BYFP alongside Gali Gold from the Barbican Cinema. 

The Emerging Film Curators Lab is a free career development programme designed to give young people a chance to establish themselves in the UK cinema exhibition sector. The successful individuals and teams, who are now presenting their funded programmes at the Barbican, have received training from experienced film curators to give insight and practical information on how to programme, produce and market their own cinema screening events.

Barbican Cinema is delighted to announce the Emerging Film Curators Series, developed by up-and-coming curators, who took part in the Barbican’s Emerging Film Curators Lab in  2023, designed to widen the range of voices on screen. This four-part series, which explores the notion of change in the social and political landscape, begins in January and continues to March 2024.

The series starts with Visions from the Wake: Grief and its Afterlives in Global Cinema, curated by Cici Peng, which explores the subject of death and grieving in cinema and looks at alternative ways of mourning. This event also includes a live reading from former gal-dem editor-in-chief Suyin Haynes and a guided meditation from Rieko Whitfield.

The second event in the series, Stims: Towards a Neurodiverse Cinema and Filmmaker ScreenTalk, is curated by Lillian Crawford. This collection of eight short films, spanning animation to documentary, by five neurodiverse directors, will be followed by a panel discussion focusing on what a neurodiverse cinema looks like.

Further programmes taking place between February and March 2024 are: Unseen Avant-Gardes: Women Experimental Filmmakers in Yugoslavia, 1960-90 and ScreenTalk curated by Teodora Kosanović, a collection of rebellious and poetic experimental short films made by women filmmakers during a culturally significant period in Yugoslavia; and Changing with the Tides, an immersive journey across coastal communities in the UK, with short films that document the dramatic changes in fishing industries and communities over the last seven decades. Curated by Aryan Tauqeer Khawaja, Sophiya Sian, Tony Yang, this programme will be accompanied by live poetry readings and guest speakers.


Awa KonatéAssistant Curator, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
“ Giving people their flowers while they can still receive them is something I hold close to my heart. I first met Suzy Gillett in 2020, during the Barbican’s Emerging Film Curator Lab, where her guidance as course leader was an important step in shaping my path and profoundly deepened my curatorial understanding of the moving image as a space for dialogue and discovery. It was following that lab that I curated my first-ever screening for the Barbican cinema, a moment that, in many ways, still feels like the beginning of everything that followed. I remain profoundly grateful for Suzy’s generosity, insight, and the foundation she helped me build at such an important stage of my career. 💛”


Gwynn Hall Programming Group 



On behalf of Mustard Studios I created a bespoke film curating programme for the cinema Gwynn Hall.