The film festival that behaves like a convention — built for filmmakers, thrown open to everyone, and set in an English village.
LowDown was built on a simple hunch: that filmmakers deserve more than a screening slot and a handshake. So we made a festival that behaves like a convention — a place to show your film, yes, but also to run a panel, teach a workshop, meet your peers, and stay a while.
With independent films and the people who make them right at its heart, LowDown gives everyone — filmmakers and the curious public alike — the run of the village. Panels and workshops cover the whole craft: VFX, practical make-up, editing, writing and more, so there's something for everyone.
Add silent cinema, a drive-in, a handful of traders, real film & TV props and a grand finale in the Big Top, and you have an experience for filmmakers we believe is unparalleled in the UK.
Flat Fenland, big skies, and room to spread out.
Holme sits in the Fens near Cambridge and Peterborough — the sort of wide, quiet, big-skied countryside that makes an outdoor screen feel enormous. For five days we take over most of the village and the land around it: barns become cinemas, a meadow becomes a drive-in, and the Big Top goes up for the finale.
It's easy to reach by road or rail from Cambridge, Peterborough and beyond, and there's space to camp for filmmakers who want the full run of it. The setting isn't a backdrop — it's part of the show.
Declan founded and directs LowDown, and he's the reason it feels less like an industry event and more like a proper get-together. He built the festival around the belief that the best things happen when filmmakers are in the same field for a few days — not just watching each other's work, but talking, teaching and swapping ideas.
He and the LowDown team watch every submission, shape the programme by hand, and are known — by the filmmakers who've been — for running the whole thing with unusual warmth and care.
Get in touchWhether you're bringing a film or just a deckchair — LowDown 2027 runs 28 June to 2 July.