Whitley Bay Film Festival Returns for September 2026 with Nick Broomfield

The Whitley Bay Film Festival is back for another September, and the 2026 programme is one of its most ambitious yet. As ever, the festival takes cinema out of a single auditorium and spreads it across a string of characterful coastal venues, from the town's own Jam Jar Cinema on Park Avenue to the atmospheric setting of St Mary's Lighthouse on its tidal island.

This year's festival opened on 5 September at The Crescent Club with a screening of the acclaimed documentary maker Nick Broomfield's Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. Festival patron Ian La Frenais, the Newcastle-born co-creator of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, introduced Broomfield for a post-screening conversation reflecting on a career spanning more than five decades.

A programme built around the coast

Beyond opening night, the line-up leans into the festival's trademark mix of anniversaries, cult favourites and one-off spectacles. Highlights include a centenary screening of Buster Keaton's The General, marking 100 years of the silent classic with a live electronic soundtrack, and a 40th-anniversary showing of Jim Henson's Labyrinth at Seaton Delaval Hall. Graham Fellows marks 20 years of It's Nice Up North back at The Crescent Club.

Familiar crowd-pleasers such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dr Strangelove, Play Misty for Me and The Truman Show sit alongside a celebration of Amber Films and the work of North Shields writer Tom Hadaway. Screenings are spread across the Stephenson Steam Railway Museum, the Rendezvous Café and Cullercoats' Fishermen's Mission as well as the Jam Jar and the lighthouse.

Best for:

Venues change from film to film, so always check where your screening is held when you book. The full programme and tickets are on the festival's own website, and popular titles in the more unusual settings can sell out.

The festival remains entirely volunteer-run and deliberately affordable, a labour of love that has become a fixture of the town's cultural calendar each autumn. Its knack for pairing the right film with the right place, whether a horror in a lighthouse or a silent comedy with live music, is what keeps drawing audiences back year after year.

Full details of this year's line-up were unveiled by Cultured North East.