Ian Nesbitt
Ian Nesbitt is the founder and director of Out/Side/Film. His practice spans video art, documentary film, ethnography,
grassroots cinema activism and very occasionally live art. His work focuses on working innovatively with marginal
communities and exploring peripheral territories and is often lens-based.
Graduating from Nottingham Trent in 2004, he co-founded Stand Assembly and then One Thoresby Street
(www.onethoresbystreet.org). In 2007 he co-founded Annexinema with Emily Wilczek, an experimental moving image
organization whose interests lie in creating space outside institutional structures, and in the idea of cinema as a
social phenomenon. Annexinema has been widely commissioned including by Nottingham Contemporary, Sideshow 2010,
Hinterland Festival, Eastside Projects, and the Falmouth Convention. Annexinema recently curated a section of the
screening programme for Sheffield Fringe 2013. He founded Out/Side/Film, initially as a platform for the production and
distribution of his own films, in January 2011.
As a documentary filmmaker he has made 2 feature films. Arise, You Gallant Sweeneys!, completed in 2010, which was
co-directed with a group of Irish former migrant workers. It was the subject of a photoarticle in Guardian Weekend by
writer Jon McGregor and was broadcast on TG4 Irish television in December 2012. His most recent film, Taking the Michael,
made with Matthew Pountney (DJ Rubbish, Tourettes Hero), is a documentary made about and with communities living on the St
Michael Ley line (an ancient pilgrim route crossing the whole country) between Avebury in Wiltshire and St Michaels’ Mount
in Cornwall. The film toured the UK in late 2012, showing in cinemas, artspaces, galleries and pop-up rural screenings in
barns, fields and temporary and permanent living structures across the country and particularly in the South West. It was
selected for Sheffield Doc/Fest 2013.
His shorter video works have been screened and exhibited internationally since 2004, including at Nottingham Contemporary,
EMAF Osnabruck, CCA Glasgow, CCA Moscow, and Liverpool Biennial.
Ian is also currently working on a new film commission, having won the 2012 Broadway Film and Video Prize.