Today, Aesthetica Film Festival announces its most expansive programme to date, with York set to become a meeting point for the people shaping the future of film, television, art, sound, games and immersive media this November. The festival returns from 4–8 November, bringing more than 300 films alongside masterclasses, premieres, live music, games, virtual reality, podcasting, immersive art and one of the UK’s most substantial industry programmes. Across five days, more than 300 films will sit alongside masterclasses, premieres, live music, games, virtual reality, podcasting, immersive art and one of the UK’s most substantial industry programmes, bringing together filmmakers, artists, producers, commissioners, musicians, developers and creative businesses from more than 60 different countries around the world.
The festival’s 16th edition makes a compelling case for York as a place where Britain’s creative industries actively imagine what comes next. Representatives from Aardman, BBC, Film4, Framestore, ITV, Neal Street Productions and Ubisoft will be among those contributing to the programme, while the UK Production Summit brings together figures from Film4, Ridley Scott Associates, Sky and Warner Bros. With more than 6,500 people typically attending its industry sessions, Aesthetica has become considerably larger than a film festival: it is one of the UK’s key annual moments for the creative industries to meet.
At its centre is cinema, but Aesthetica’s ambition has always been to look beyond the screen and question the future of image culture. The programme spans documentary, drama, animation, comedy, dance, fashion, music video, thriller and experimental cinema, with screen talent including Aisling Bea, David Jonsson, Maxine Peake, Michael Sheen, Sally Phillips and Stephen Fry alongside emerging filmmakers.
However, the festival recognises that contemporary storytelling now moves fluidly between film, television, gaming, music, audio, technology and visual art, and its programme reflects that expanded creative landscape. The Games Lab showcases 50 games across PC, console, headsets and smart devices, while the VR Lab explores immersive cinema and new forms of audience experience; meanwhile, the New Music Stage and Podcasting Lounge create space for emerging artists, audio makers, labels and storytellers. It is this collision of disciplines that gives Aesthetica its particular energy: audiences can watch a film in the morning, encounter a new game or immersive artwork in the afternoon, hear live music in the evening and find themselves in conversation with a producer, artist or commissioner before the day is over.
That sense of connection extends into York itself, where the festival’s Radical Listening programme will transform the city centre into an extraordinary open-air gallery of sound, light and media art. Developed in partnership with Audible, the programme includes 12 new commissions, with three major installations taking over some of York’s most prominent public spaces, completely free to experience. At York Theatre Royal, environmental artist Steve Messam will present Fruere Silentio, an enormous inflatable structure reaching approximately the height of the building, with a four-minute vocal score recorded across all 20 remaining medieval churches within York’s city walls and York Minster. In King’s Square, Gemma Wood of Being Now Here will create Henge: Echoes Through Time, a landscape of 20 three-metre towers in sound and light, drawing together York’s bells, hawks, industrial histories, fires and ironworks. At Exhibition Square, Squidsoup will present The Sound of Coming Back to Life, combining volumetric light and sound in a deeply personal work based on founder Anthony Rowe’s experience of surviving cardiac arrest.
For Aesthetica Director Cherie Federico, bringing this work into the public realm is fundamental to what the festival can offer York. “Aesthetica has always believed that the arts should be part of everyday life, not something people have to feel they need permission to enter,” she says. “Radical Listening is significant because we are taking ambitious, international-quality work and putting it directly into York’s public spaces, completely free.” She continues: “York is the UK’s only UNESCO City of Media Arts, and this is an opportunity to demonstrate what that means in practice. We are bringing artists, technology, sound and storytelling together across the city and giving York something genuinely special – a programme made for everyone.” The result is an unusual proposition for a festival: the city itself becomes part of the experience, with major media artworks encountered not behind gallery doors but on streets and squares familiar to residents, visitors and passers-by. For five days, York’s historic architecture becomes the distinctive backdrop for work that is contemporary, experimental and international in scale.
The artists involved underline the breadth of that ambition. Squidsoup, whose installations have appeared in more than 70 locations worldwide, brings a work to York that transforms a personal experience into an environment of sound and light. “We have presented our work in more than 70 locations around the world, but every place changes the work,” says Hannah Brady of Squidsoup. “York has such a strong character and history, and we are excited to bring this very personal story into the everyday life of the city.” Messam similarly sees scale as a way of drawing audiences into an encounter with art: “Scale changes the way people encounter art. When something is this large, you see it and immediately want to know what it is.” Inside the vast structure, however, the experience becomes intimate, with the artist describing the work as “a very quiet work about listening to York itself.” For Gemma Wood, the commission represents an opportunity to be able to push her practice into undiscovered territory: “Aesthetica is giving me the scale and platform to make something I simply couldn’t make without that support.”
The Radical Listening programme reaches back to cinema’s earliest history, with six contemporary composers creating live scores for films made before 1925. The premise is simple: silent cinema was never silent, and new sound can radically alter how audiences understand images. Alongside the three immersive artworks and six new scores, three new documentaries will premiere at the festival on Friday 6 November, followed by Q&As, DJs, drinks and networking. It is a programme that moves deliberately between the historic and the contemporary, asking audiences to reconsider familiar forms while embracing technologies that are changing how stories are made and experienced. This is characteristic of Aesthetica: cinema, art, music and technology converge, with film as the starting point, not the limit.
That philosophy is perhaps why the festival has become such a distinctive fixture within the UK’s creative industries. Britain has extraordinary cultural institutions and production companies, but its creative economy has historically been concentrated around London, making the existence of a genuinely international gathering in York significant. Aesthetica does not present itself as a regional alternative to a London event; over 16 years, it has built an international network that brings established industry figures, emerging practitioners and audiences into the same space. “There is a real re-centring taking place in Britain,” says Federico. “We are seeing it politically, economically and culturally. The North is rising, and the creative industries are vital to that story.” For her, the festival’s location is part of its proposition: “This isn’t a regional version of something that belongs in London. It is an international event with York at its centre.”
York is particularly suited to this role. As the UK’s UNESCO City of Media Arts, the city already has an international identity built around the intersection of creativity, culture and technology, and Aesthetica turns that designation into something audiences can physically experience. The UNESCO City of Media Arts EXPO brings organisations working across film, games, immersive technology, digital storytelling and creative innovation together, while the wider festival connects universities, creative businesses, cultural organisations and artists with a global network of practitioners. The effect is to create an unusual kind of creative ecosystem: one in which a historic city becomes a temporary laboratory for the future of storytelling. Walk through York and the programme follows you, from cinema screens to public squares, from immersive technology to live performance, from games and podcasts to monumental installations.
And then there is the sheer concentration of people. Aesthetica brings together the established and the emerging: major broadcasters and production companies alongside independent filmmakers; internationally exhibited artists alongside artists taking a major step forward in their various careers; musicians, game developers, commissioners, producers, students and audiences alongside one another. The presence of organisations such as BBC, Film4, ITV, Sky, Warner Bros, Aardman, Framestore, Neal Street Productions, Ridley Scott Associates and Ubisoft gives the industry programme a breadth that reflects the reality of contemporary creative work, where the boundaries between screen, technology, gaming, sound and art are increasingly porous. For those working in the sector, that makes the festival more than a sequence of screenings: it is a place to discover work, exchange ideas, develop relationships and encounter the people shaping the next generation of culture. For viewers, it offers something equally rare — access to the machinery, imagination and talent behind the stories they watch, hear and play.
Aesthetica Film Festival 2026 is a moment when York becomes a stage for Britain’s creative future. Over 300 films, major industry figures, emerging artists, games, VR, music, podcasts and ambitious public artworks will converge across five days, creating a programme that is deliberately impossible to experience through a single medium. Radical Listening alone promises to alter the physical experience of the city, with 20 three-metre towers in King’s Square, an installation rising to the height of York Theatre Royal and Squidsoup’s field of light and sound in Exhibition Square – all free, all part of everyday public life. Add to that the global industry programme, the UK Production Summit, the Games Lab, VR Lab, masterclasses, premieres, live events and the exceptional range of people arriving from over 60 countries, and the festival becomes a rare centre of creative energy. Aesthetica’s success is not bringing the creative industries to York; it is creating the space for other worlds to meet and generate something new. From 4–8 November, York hosts conversations about where screen, media and art are heading – shaping what is next.
Aesthetica Film Festival runs 4-8 November in York, UK.
Click here to browse the Official 2026 Aesthetica Film Festival Programme.
Click here to book your festival pass.
Words: Anna Müller
Lead image: LION, dir. Nastassia Winge Tan. Part of the Aesthetica Film Festival 2026 Dance programme.
