The Story
A four-day outdoor film festival. International guests from Europe and the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. A six-month embedded training programme for schools and community groups across South Holderness. All of it happening in one of the most geographically isolated towns on the East Yorkshire coast.
This was the Withernsea International Film Festival — and it was one of the most ambitious community media projects Cafe Society ever delivered.
The Education Action Zone
In 2001, Withernsea carried an Education Action Zone designation — a government recognition of significant educational and socioeconomic challenge in the area. For a small coastal town twenty miles from Hull, cut off by the flat Holderness plain with few transport links and limited economic opportunity, the EAZ was both an acknowledgement of real difficulty and a mandate to do something about it.
Cafe Society was commissioned by the Withernsea Education Action Zone to project-manage a six-month film and media training programme for local schools and community groups. The brief was straightforward: build filmmaking skills across the community, develop original work, and create something worth celebrating publicly at the end of it.
What emerged was anything but ordinary.
Six months of training
For six months, Jon Robson worked directly with schools and community participants across the South Holderness region — teaching filmmaking fundamentals, developing storytelling skills, and helping participants find and articulate their own creative voice on camera.
The work wasn’t about producing polished, broadcast-ready content. It was about giving people — young people especially — the experience of making something real, something that reflected their community and their experience, and then sharing it with an audience.
By the end of the six months, the participants had a body of work worth showing. The festival was built around it.
The festival
The Withernsea International Film Festival ran over four days in the summer of 2001 — a genuine outdoor film festival in a town that had never hosted anything quite like it.
The programme combined local work produced during the training programme with curated international films and invited guest speakers. The international dimension was significant and deliberate — speakers from Europe and, in a direct connection to the Navajo workshop programme running in parallel, guests from the Navajo Reservation in the USA.
Bringing international voices to Withernsea was a deliberate act of creative generosity. The message it sent to the young people and schools involved was unambiguous — your work, your town, and your stories are worth an international conversation.
The Holderness thread
The Withernsea project sits at the heart of a thread that runs through the entire Cafe Society decade — a sustained, committed engagement with the communities of the East Yorkshire coast and the Holderness plain.
These weren’t glamorous locations. They weren’t places that attracted arts funding easily or got much attention from the cultural establishment. But they had stories. They had young people who deserved the same creative opportunities as anyone else. And they had communities that, when given the tools and the space to make something, made work that was worth celebrating in front of an international audience.
The connection to Digital Schools
The instinct that drove the Withernsea project — find the isolated community, understand what they need, give them the tools to be heard — is the same instinct that drives Digital Schools today.
The schools of South Holderness are still there. Some of them are Digital Schools clients. The coast hasn’t changed much. But every school that works with Digital Schools now has a website that tells their story clearly, meets every statutory requirement, and gives parents and the wider community a genuine first impression of who they are and what they stand for.
That’s not so different from a four-day outdoor film festival in a small coastal town in 2001. The medium changes. The belief doesn’t.
The success of the Withernsea Film Festival reinforced the belief that young people and local communities deserved professional creative platforms — an approach that would continue through projects such as Seychelles — Five Islands and Africa Unite.
Project managed by Jon Robson for the Withernsea Education Action Zone. seasidefilms.com, 2001.
