Hull will come alive for a weekend of wonder with events and shows for the whole family to enjoy. Explore the streets and see what you find as this year’s three-day festival programme artistically woven together through street theatre, dance and acrobatics alongside a community feast, debates, exhibitions and participatory projects. Freedom Festival was launched in 2007 to commemorate anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce and has since established itself as the city’s annual festival celebrating creative expression and community. More than a decade later, it continues to be the jewel in Hull’s cultural crown, with last year’s Freedom Festival hailed as the best and most diverse to date. Freedom Festival 2019 marks the 12th anniversary of the Hull festival and organisers promise a truly beautiful and mesmerising line-up.
Big Bus Day is back for 2018! Lots of bus related fun at Hull’s Streetlife Museum of Transport, including displays of vintage and modern buses, FREE open top and vintage bus rides, bus memorabilia, photos and models for sale, bus games and more! It’s a great day out for the whole family. Admission is free, although donations to charity are welcome.
Europe’s longest standing science Festival will travel to Hull & the Humber this September.
Science the night away at the Humber Street Party, discover if you’re a super-recogniser, unlock the secrets of the canine mind or take part in some UV yoga. There really is something for everyone.
The diverse programme of over a hundred talks, debates, performances and activities will be happening across the University campus and Hull city for four days only.
2018 Hull Science Festival -15th & 16th September University of Hull.
The Hull Science Festival is back! This year we’ve got fossils galore, virtual realities, a science themed games arcade, black hole experiences, Little Miss Inventor and much more besides! And it’s all coming together to make for an enthralling weekend of science themed entertainment for all the family.
Following hot on the heels of the British Science Festival (11-14th September) the weekend will cap off a 6 day science extravoganza the likes of which Hull has never seen before.
And best of all it’s all FREE!
For full programme and tickets, please visit http://scifest.hull.ac.uk/
Hull Comic Con is back with its annual dose of Super Hero, Sci Fi and gaming fun. This year’s event is taking place in Hull Minster, Trinity Square and Trinity Market and what’s more it is absolutely free entry! With activities, workshops, traders, guest signings, interview panels, games and plenty of cos play characters this will be a great day out for the whole family in the amazing surroundings of Trinity Square.
The team are thrilled to bring you some amazing artists, both professional and straight from the pages of some of your favourite comic books!
This summer, a large-scale free festival of local music, art and entertainment will be held in Pearson Park, Hull.
Expect to see the very best of the vast local talent on offer in Hull. From main stage acts like Pearls Cab Ride, The Gherkins & Hillbilly Troupe, to spoken word performers, art workshops, children’s entertainers, face painters, Carnival Arts, stalls, food and more, there is something for everyone!
The festival has been designed with accessibility in mind. The get-involved activities are designed to be accessible to a range of audiences, BSL interpreters will be available all day, and there will be disabled toilets and a changing place.
Engage For Change is a free music festival celebrating community, hope, music, arts and activism, hosting a number of bands and artists, stalls and influential speakers.
Echoing the Red Wedge concerts of the 80s, and Glastonbury’s Left Field, the festival aims to bring people together, welcoming a line-up of political minded, community-spirited musicians and performers.
A family-friendly event, there’ll be a number of children’s activities taking place in the family area, some surprises from Hull Carnival Arts, a wide range of political and community activist speakers, stalls and information, and continual live music during the day.
A locally grown feast for everyone, The Freedom FEASTival is a gastronomic event like no other!
The volunteer-led, free feast encourages strangers to come together to meet, talk, eat and remind each other that connectivity is as vital as the food we eat.
Last year over 2,000 people came together in two sittings to share the free gastronomic feast in Queen’s Garden’s as part of the 10th Freedom Festival celebrations. As theatrical performers served and entertained guests, strangers sat together to share in the delight of locally grown and cooked produce, eaten as part of a true community feast.
Working in partnership with Hull Harvest Feastival Mutual Aid and Artlink alongside multiple community groups across the city, the Freedom FEASTival is a long-lasting programme rooted in a broader discussion around food equity, empowerment and community cohesion.
Everyone is welcome to get involved in this extraordinary community project. You can:
Grow your own food
Sow-a-row
Make a veg pledges
Volunteer on the day – from cooking the feast to serving the food.
The Lord Mayor’s Celebration Day will take place on Saturday 16 June across Trinity Square and the Rose Bowl area of Queens Gardens.
The family event is being delivered by Hull City Council in partnership with Hull COOLture and Hull Minster to provide a variety of music, culture, arts and craft as well as over 90 classic cars on display, between 10am and 4pm.
A vibrant parade will take place at two points through the day at 12pm and 2pm and everyone is invited to be involved. Led by Hull Carnival Arts, the parade will leave Trinity Square along Trinity House Lane, before moving down Whitefriargate, along Princes Dock Street and back into Trinity Square via Posterngate. The procession will feature Bandanarama – a 16 piece community street band – and everyone is invited to join in!
Two stages will host music, dance and art. Jonny Pat and the Aces, award winning singing duo V2, Bobby Diamond and the brilliant Karen Carpenter tribute, Wendy Lee, will be amongst those filling Trinity Square with music between 10am and 1pm. From 1pm to 4pm an eclectic mix of dance, poetry and music will be performed including traditional Indian dance, street dance and Irish dance. Whilst the stage at the Rose Bowl will provide entertainment by COOLture where children and young people will celebrate creative arts between 11am and 3pm.
A craft area in Trinity Square will offer free activities for children and young people with Hull Creative Arts and make hats and instruments to join in with the parade.
All activities are free, and people are welcome to bring a picnic or use one of the many city centre venues. The café in Queens Gardens will be open, as will Trinity Market.
The award-winning Beverley Puppet Festival returns! Enjoy a weekend of family fun with giant Saurus, Moomins, Mermarella, Penguinpig, Beowulf, Transmographiles and Cloud Travellers.
And there’s more for adults too, with Friday 13th tales of terror from the seaside and a puppet cabaret like you’ve never seen before, plus adult shows across the weekend.
With over 30 acts in four ticketed venues plus free outdoor performances, a lively Festival Hub, free interactive shadow theatre, puppet workshops for adults and children, food and licensed bar, and much more, everyone can take part in the fun.
This September, experience an amazing cheese spectacle in Hull! Join Cheese Fest UK, hosted at the amazing new venue in Hull.
Experience some the UK’s best cheeses on offer, from how street food traders through to a selection of amazing specialist artisan vendors from all the country, inredible preserves and a whole host of other amazing treats.
Join in for not just amazing food, but also a great and music for everyone to enjoy!
Hull Folk & Maritime Festival returns promising more great acts, from local artists to high-profile headline names, folk dancing, singarounds, workshops and historic vessels moored up in the marina.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT DUE TO THE WEATHER WARNING FROM THE MET OFFICE FOLK FESTIVAL EVENTS THIS EVENING 27 JULY WILL BE CANCELLED.
Returning for it’s fourth outing this summer, the Cottingham Folk Festival takes place across the august bank holiday Weekend in the picturesque village of Cottingham, near Hull.
The live music extravaganza will see an incredible line-up of artists descend on what is thought to be the largest village in the UK.
The 2018 line-up includes Roland Gift, Wilko Johnson, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, Ward Thomas, Badly Drawn Boy and Lucy Spraggan.
Hull Film Festival is back for the fifth year, inviting you discover the very best in new film from around the world, with titles that are award-winning, critically-acclaimed, unashamedly independent, and a little out of left field.
This year’s programme features 16 films, all Hull exclusive screenings, and they’re proud to be hosting multiple regional premieres.
In the dark heart of a sprawling, anonymous city, Terminal follows the twisting tales of two assassins carrying out a sinister mission (Max Irons & Dexter Fletcher), a teacher battling a fatal illness (Simon Pegg), an enigmatic janitor (Mike Myers) and a curious waitress leading a dangerous double life (Margot Robbie).
Murderous consequences unravel in the dead of night as their lives all intertwine at the hands of a mysterious criminal mastermind hell-bent on revenge.
Among the most exciting voices in genre cinema to emerge in recent years, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead return with their third feature, The Endless.
Benson and Moorhead play brothers, former members of a “crazy UFO death cult”, who receive a mysterious video cassette in the mail. The tape contains an eerie calling card from their past, inviting them to attend an event called the Ascension.
At first their old friends in the cult seem warm and welcoming, but things soon turn strange as the brothers find themselves drawn into a vortex of bizarre rituals, strange messages, unseen forces and sinister supernatural secrets that threaten to tear apart the very fabric of reality.
The Endless is a truly unique mind-bending, genre-blending indie gem that will leave you spinning.
This dark suburban satire tells the story of a man who is accused of adultery by his ex-fiancée and forced to move in with his parents.
While he fights for custody of his four-year-old daughter, he is gradually sucked into a bitter dispute between his parents and their neighbours regarding an old and beautiful tree that casts a shadow on the neighbours’ deck.
As the dispute intensifies – property is damaged, pets mysteriously go missing, security cameras are being installed and there is a rumour that the neighbour was seen with a chainsaw.
Forever remembered as the writer who gave the world Frankenstein, but the real life story of Mary Shelley is nearly as fantastical as her fiction.
Raised by a renowned philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a teenage dreamer, determined to make her mark on the world when she meets the dashing and brilliant poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth).
So begins a torrid love affair, marked by both passion and personal tragedy, that will transform Mary and fuel the writing of her Gothic masterwork. Imbued with the imaginative spirit of its heroine, Mary Shelley brings to life the world of a trailblazing woman who defied convention and channelled her innermost demons into a legend for the ages.
Once a rising star of the rodeo circuit, Brady is warned that his riding days are over, after a horse crushed his skull at a rodeo.
Back home on the Pine Ridge Reservation, with little desire or alternatives for a different way of life, Brady’s sense of inadequacy mounts as he is unable to ride or rodeo.
In an attempt to regain control of his own fate, Brady undertakes a search for new identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of America.
As devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, sisters Alex and Luisa and their mother, Ivanna, are united in The Truth. Alex looks up to her confident older sister, while striving to follow in Ivanna’s footsteps as a ‘good Witness’.
But when Luisa starts to question the advice of the Elders, she makes a life-altering transgression that threatens to expel her from the congregation.
Apostasy is a remarkable and authentic debut film, providing rare insight into the complex nature of faith, family, duty and love.
Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) looks the part of a perfect high school girl, but after she’s caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night, Cameron is quickly shipped off to a conversion therapy centre that treats teens “struggling with same-sex attraction.”
At the facility, she is subjected to outlandish discipline, dubious “de-gaying” methods, and earnest Christian rock songs-but this unusual setting also provides her with an unlikely gay community.
For the first time, Cameron connects with peers, and she’s able to find her place among fellow outcasts.
In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance.
She rebels against the silence and complicity that surround her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance.
Enn is a shy suburban London teenager in 1977, sneaking out with his best friends to after-hours punk parties. One night they stumble upon a bizarre gathering of sexy teenagers ,who seem like they are from another planet. In fact, they are from another planet, visiting Earth to complete a mysterious rite of passage.
That doesn’t stop Enn from falling madly in love with Zan, a beautiful and rebellious alien teenager who, despite her allegiance to her strange colony, is fascinated by Enn.
Together they embark on a delirious adventure through the kinetic punk rock world of 1970s London, inadvertently setting off a series of events that will lead to the ultimate showdown of punks vs. aliens, and test the limits of how far each of them will go for true love.
A Prayer Before Dawn is the remarkable true story of Billy Moore, a young English boxer incarcerated in two of Thailand’s most notorious prisons. He is quickly thrown into a terrifying world of drugs and gang violence, but when the prison authorities allow him to take part in the Muay Thai boxing tournaments, he realises this might be his chance to get out.
Billy embarks on a relentless, action-packed journey from one savage fight to the next, stopping at nothing to do whatever he must to preserve his life and regain his freedom.
Tara (Gemma Arterton) is living a life that is no longer hers: it belongs to her overworked, self-absorbed husband (Dominic Cooper), her young son and daughter, and the numbing routine of housework and childcare.
In desperate need of a change, Tara one day makes a bold decision. Armed with a one-way ticket to Paris, she leaves everything behind to rediscover herself in a new city, but walking out on your life isn’t so simple.
The Escape is a perceptive, deeply compassionate portrait of a woman on the rocky road to becoming herself.
Blake Edwards’ screen adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella stars Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, an eccentric high-class escort working in New York.
When young writer Paul Varjack (George Peppard), the kept man of a wealthy older woman, moves into Holly’s apartment block, he finds inspiration when he falls in love with her.
It’s love at first sight at the racing circuit, when gangster Gino meets Benedicte a wealthy and fearless racing driver.
Fierce and loyal, Gigi and Bibi fight for their love against fate, reason and their own weaknesses. But how far can endurance be stretched? How far can they go to try and save what may already be lost?
A young mother drifts from one motel to the next with her intoxicating boyfriend and her 8-year-old son.
The makeshift family scrapes by, living one hustle at a time, until the discovery of a mobile home community offers an alternative life.
Donnie is a troubled high school student: in therapy, prone to sleepwalking, and visits from a six-foot rabbit named Frank who tells him the world will end in 28 days 06 hours 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
During that time he will navigate teenage life, narrowly avoid death in the form of a falling jet engine, follow Frank’s maladjusted instructions and try to maintain the space-time continuum.
‘Lucky’ follows the spiritual journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off the map desert town.
Acclaimed character actor John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut is at once a love letter to the life and career of Harry Dean Stanton as well as a meditation on morality, loneliness, spirituality, and human connection.
The third Hedon Festival returns in July, with live music, entertainment, performance poetry, children’s activities and a major carnival parade. This a free event hosted by the local community and pub venues.
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