After first coming to my attention at the 2024 edition of Women with a Movie Camera Summit and losing myself to a varied and refreshing programme of films, none of which I had previously encountered, it has been a pleasure to follow the progress and continued expansion of the T A P E Collective platform. Founded in 2015 by Isra Al Kassi and Angela Moneke, T A P E has broadened from family and friends screenings in gardens to valued industry talks and partnerships, ever-evolving and enticing seasons packed with activities and an audacious move into distribution which aptly matches their ethos of “reppin could-be cult classics”. T A P E are passionate advocates for bringing a broad selection of underrepresented films to audiences who are often underserved, a remit we definitely jibe with here at DN, and so for the first 2025 interview in our continuing Film Industry Insights series, we spoke to Isra about their initial struggle to find a place in the wider industry until the BLM movement galvanised interest, her frustration with the exclusionary diversity standards at all levels of the industry and adding an impressive expanding distribution arm to T A P E Collective’s growing portfolio of offerings.
Welcome to Directors Notes, please introduce yourself and tell us about T A P E Collective.
My name is Isra Al Kassi, I’m a UK-based Curator/Writer/Project Manager/T A P E Co-Founder. Most of my work is through T A P E Collective, which I co-founded 10 years ago with Angela Moneke. We started off fresh, young-faced and hustling as we were both finishing our degrees and met through the Barbican Young Programmers Scheme, we both had on our bright yellow LFF lanyards because it was October and we started talking about the work we were doing, which was essentially watching films and writing reviews for free on various online outlets. It just so happened that Angie and I had the same commute home from the Barbican so we spent our journey talking about our wishes and dreams about the industry. At that point, we didn’t know much about the inner workings, but we knew what we wanted to do and what we were interested in.
I don’t think we were that angry at the time (we’re probably angrier now) but wanted to carve out a space for ourselves where we could do our own thing.
Angie’s British-Nigerian and I’m Iraqi-Swedish so there was a lot to talk about in terms of representation. We didn’t set out with the intention to change the way things were but were both really driven by being bored of the way things were done. I don’t think we were that angry at the time (we’re probably angrier now) but wanted to carve out a space for ourselves where we could do our own thing. Both Angie and I are cinephiles and film nerds and felt very much pigeonholed. We started off with the grand discussion of wanting to open a cinema, which is hard to do so we started doing alternative screenings instead. T A P E has always been a thing that we turn to when we want to do what we want to do. We both had full-time jobs for a long time, Angie still works full-time, but I’ve continued and the team is growing. We’re still working collectively in our curation but we do more than curate now, we do more than screenings which has led to our need to grow.
You saw that representation was desperately needed, how then did you find the reception after introducing the platform?
To be honest with you it wasn’t a great reception in the bigger, wider industry. I’ve reminded Angie recently that we couldn’t book a cinema screen until about two years ago so it was alternative spaces, which at the time worked out really well for us. I always say this to anyone who’s starting off now, you need to start with your friends and family. Then when people start showing up that you don’t know personally or by first name, that’s when it gets really exciting. Our first three/four screenings were with friends and family. We set up in cafes and gardens and then as it grew we started getting more experimental with our programming and what we put in our marketing, and then strangers started showing up.
It’s about finding films that don’t necessarily screen in the UK and presenting them to our wider community, which is something that we started off doing and that’s something that we still do.
In terms of wider industry reception, We weren’t really recognised until COVID and the heightened BLM movement which I’ve always been honest about. In 2020 the words diversity, racial equity and anti-racist activity kicked off – then people started turning to us for various things. What’s interesting is that we’ve always done the same thing, it’s about finding films that don’t necessarily screen in the UK and presenting them to our wider community, which is something that we started off doing and that’s something that we still do. So what we do isn’t different, but in terms of who we get to work with now, that has changed.
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You offer fresh, innovative and disparate curation, how do you go about finding the right films for T A P E?
It’s a real mix. Angie has always been really good from the very beginning in terms of knowing what’s out there and what’s in production because she’s a producer, so she’s very much aware of what’s happening and films that are being screened at international festivals, but maybe not coming to the UK. We’re also open to people sending us their projects and then it is also about knowing what is out there and what is available. People are always trying to say things like the ‘first time’ or the ‘biggest’ and to me, those things aren’t important. What’s important is sustainability and longevity. So if a film has been screened before, it doesn’t mean that we can’t screen it.
For us to be supported, we also need to make sure that we support other organisations. Being aware of other people’s events and showing up to those. Being inspired and just knowing what’s going on out there. There are various digital platforms for short films now so we make sure we watch those films. I will be honest, we take a really long time to review submissions but it comes up when we are putting together a short film programme. Then I know where I need to go and we have a list of things to keep an eye out for when looking for particular submissions.
I’ve seen that you work on guest curation for other festivals.
We’ve had long term partnerships both with Aesthetica and London Short Film Festival for three years. The partnership with London Short Film Festival was meatier, with thirty programmes. The first year we did ten special events, ten guest curations and ten industry events. We realized that that was just too much so we’ve now cut it down to between five and twenty every year. We don’t get involved in their submissions or the official selection or competition but we bring our special curation because we like to mix contemporary with archive quite a lot. We love to be really specific with our themes. For example at Aesthetica in 2021 we presented a programme about British Muslim identifying women making moving image art. It’s fun to be able to explore those themes because we know that there’s an audience for it and we know that the filmmakers are there and have never seen it being brought together in this way.
Then with LSFF, the industry events were a lot of fun as we were coming at it from a place of what would we want to know then who do we know which was really important. When we do these craft panels, we really struggle to find a white man to invite to the panel just because of who we know and who we work with so it’s been quite interesting. Other people will come to us looking for more diverse names which we don’t struggle with as those are our friends, our collaborators and so they’re out there and we’re out there. That’s why it’s quite easy for us to put together programs often lauded for being diverse and different – it’s just the people that we know.
I know there is a problem in the industry with ‘diversity washing’, what are your feelings on this?
As I said in the beginning, I’m definitely angrier now than when I was starting off and I think it is frustrating. The more we force people into these box-ticking exercises, the more it becomes a box-ticking exercise. An example is the BFI Diversity Standards, there’s a form you have to fill out and that form will tell you how diverse your project is and how likely it is to be funded. I’ve already given feedback on this, which is that this is an incredibly othering form. A lot of the work we do is about making sure that people don’t feel other. Those with mixed heritage or dual identity backgrounds who are British and… as opposed to being other and feeling alienated from this industry or feeling like they have to assimilate or like they have to mask or pretend. So the diversity standards are already an issue because you’re coming at it assuming that I’m not fitting into these boxes or that I have to prove myself.
Then I think about all the white led organizations – male led, white led, able-bodied organizations that are filling out these forms, also feeling pressured to portray themselves as diverse just to get the funding, which is a massive problem because the second you have that form you ask yourself, how am I supposed to fill that out? In our team, we’re all women and the majority of us are not white so to come at it from that perspective trying to fill out the form is really tricky. I also think that it doesn’t really serve because it creates a situation of tokenism. It doesn’t create sustainable shifts and changes because people are frantically trying to get the funding and so they’ll do anything or they’re terrified of being cancelled for being racist and so they start these desperate attempts at being diverse.
If you are unable to recruit a diverse team then there’s something wrong with your process or there’s something wrong with your approach, because it shouldn’t be this hard.
I think there’s a sliding scale. If you are white, your sliding scale of diversity, representation and anti-racism can, unfortunately, only go so far. I think that you can try, you can work with the right people and do all the things you think are right but it’s not going to be the same as having an organization that is led by lived experience. These things come naturally to us, a lot of the things we apply for funding for – we know the people, we don’t have to hire people to find the people. That’s another problem, if you are unable to recruit a diverse team then there’s something wrong with your process or there’s something wrong with your approach, because it shouldn’t be this hard. But hey, what are you supposed to do? If the majority of funders are white led then you end up having to present yourself as coming from that perspective. It’s quite tricky stuff.
As we’re talking about funding it was great to see your name as one of the recipients of the UK Global Screen Fund.
I think within film all roads lead to the BFI, which is funny because we actually would like to be sustainable outside of the biggest institution within film, but it’s not possible. If you were to go to the Arts Council, they would say go to BFI then you go to the BFI and they say go to the Arts Council. We’re not for profit so sometimes there are more things available to us because we haven’t gone down the larger commercial route but the majority of our funding has been BFI, probably 95% from different pots and grants. Anything from the hubs who do special seasons and also we’ve had bigger funds through audience funding with the BFI.
For the past three years, we’ve been able to build T A P E into an organisation that has employees and has created jobs which is not something we could do without public funding.
The UK Global Screen Fund is for building international relationships which for us, as an organisation that was very specifically South London for a long time, and then we moved on to being London-wide and now UK-wide our next step is in international connections and collaborations. The reality is without those grants, we couldn’t do these things. We lasted for a very long time without public funding, for eight years we were running on passion and no sleep and now for the past three years, we’ve been able to build T A P E into an organisation that has employees and has created jobs which is not something we could do without public funding. But I still think it’s a bit of a shame that it’s always the BFI, it would just be good if there were other pots of funding available and that it wasn’t always the same organisation.
Recently we’ve seen big festivals such as Edinburgh International Film Festival and Encounters face uncertain futures because of funding being lost which is a scary prospect.
It’s terrifying because the funds and grants we get never cover the entire project or operation. There is quite a lot of free labour involved, especially if you’re a co-founder! I know that everyone in T A P E loves and cares about what we do but none of us have full-time pay through the organisation, we have to supplement our pay through other jobs and projects and it is so important for us to be able to deliver these projects, but it’s still never enough. There’s also the fear of familiarity. We’ve had a few grants and people know who we are, but at what stage can someone say, enough now? At what stage do we become a big organisation, when in fact we aren’t? But at what stage does it seem like we are? We do also bring in an income of our own through industry events, talks, panels and education so there’s always that to fall back on. But curation and guest curation don’t make money.
It’s often more of an exercise on branding and showing the wider world what you are all about.
The most important activity we have is exhibition. The avenues of exhibition and the avenues of where people’s films can be seen and who we collaborate with because everything we do is collaboration. I don’t think we’ve ever had a project without collaboration so it’s really important that we get to do that but no one’s paying for that. So far, no one’s commissioned a big pot of money to put together a programme. It’s always tiny amounts which is a shame that that’s what we associate with film curation.
I want to go back to your films. You’ve got a mix of projects submitted to you, films that you find and, as you mentioned, archival films. Do you run into many challenges acquiring rights as that can often be costly?
There are great organizations like Cinenova, a feminist moving image archive, or Lux, there are regional archives and there’s the BFI National Archive. It’s not easy because there are always issues with the quality or even just having the material available. They might have the rights but not the materials which has happened to us quite a lot but it’s almost part of the fun. We’ve never screened anything without the rights, even in the early days but the archive does come with a high fee. Usually, our guest curation would cover the licence fee but anytime we’ve done something ourselves – it’s a lot of money. Therein lies the imbalance. You’re not going to make that money back through exhibition but it’s incredibly important to screen these films. We’re also really good with rejection. There have been so many times where we haven’t got the rights or someone has said no. Because we’ve been running for such a long time, all we can hope is that it will be available at some point and we can go back to the idea. I love the archive collaboration and work that we do and I think people are starting to value making archive films more readily available.
A programme we put on, Where are You Really From which was based on submissions, saw people submitting films that they had been sitting on for five/six/seven years. They were often very personal pieces of work that didn’t go anywhere and if you wait another five to ten years that is a piece of archive. I think people are starting to think more about where those films are. Just because we live in a very digital age doesn’t mean that we still maintain and preserve our work. I’m trying to track down my childhood home videos and my parents just don’t care. Even in this day and age, we think that it’s all attainable but actually, we really need to look after these things, it’s not a given that these films will be available.
Let’s talk about your distribution of Bye Bye Tiberias and that growing side of the platform.
It’s a very beautiful film that has had a great response. In terms of distribution, we started two years ago. I had a friend who went to a screening of Cette Maison by Miryam Charles at the ICA and wanted me to distribute it to which I replied – T A P E is not a distributor. But then we started speaking to the sales agent, who was very kind and encouraging, so we ended up releasing the film in the UK and it had great reviews. It made the Sight and Sound top films of the year and this was a film which went back to our roots. We weren’t competing over it, we weren’t outbidding anyone. It was more of a film that was very much aligned with our work and that was important to us. Then all of a sudden we started releasing films. We’ve done Lingua Franca by Isabel Sandoval, Shabu by Shamira Raphaela, If the Streets Were On Fire by Alice Russell then Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem which I had the pleasure of watching at the London Film Festival last year. I knew about it when it was in production and development and again, because a lot of the work we do is around mixed heritage experience and dual identity, it just made sense to us. Hiam Abbass being who she is, a well-known actor, and Lina Soualem getting so much praise for the film we knew that there was going to be some competition and it wasn’t going to be straightforward. But being as patient as I am, it did work out in the end. It took a long time for us to get it over the line.
Then in terms of promotion, I think it’s really interesting starting off in exhibition because we’re so connected to an audience. Of course, we can connect with more people and we can expand our network and community, but we are always audience first. It’s a film that people really wanted to see, it had a lot of buzz around it and it is a gorgeous film. Because we do so much, we’re not at the mercy of our slate and we don’t have to rely on distributing films which means that we can distribute those that really speak to us. So we don’t have a strategy in mind in terms of how many we are going to release per year but we ask ourselves, are we the best people for this? What can we do with it that no one else necessarily would? Does it excite us? Again, it goes back to free labour, a lot of free labour goes into distributing a film because it actually costs money and doesn’t really make money so are we ready and prepared to give it our all to promote this and to keep talking about it?
After you’ve done the theatrical, it’s really important to then hand over to whoever wants to screen it.
Bye Bye Tiberias came out in June and we had a really great collaboration with the Safar Film Festival. I got in touch with them because I knew it was a film that would be great for their festival, it’s the biggest Arab British film festival in the UK and so it made sense for them to do something with it. We chatted and then we created our entire release strategy based on our collaboration with them. So their festival was in June, Lina came over and we did a whole Q&A tour. It’s definitely been our biggest title and ended up being in over 60 cinemas which is amazing. After you’ve done the theatrical, it’s really important to then hand over to whoever wants to screen it. We try to keep it as low cost as possible, I think it is an important community film, there’s a lot to be said and discussed and it’s also available to rent online now.
So what else is coming up for you in 2025?
We have a 2025 calendar and merch collaboration with Zodiac Film Club. We will be at BFI Southbank’s Woman with a Movie Camera Summit on the 18th Jan all day in the foyer with our collaging corner. We have recently launched a shorts library with some exciting short films that we’re thrilled to be representing and our SNAPSHOT season continues in 2025, and we are working with Park Circus on the release of the 4K restoration of Just Another Girl On The I.R.T.
