Film festivals are always a major party, but the UK throws some of the best shindigs you’ve never heard of. Britain boasts a plethora of high-quality small festivals where posing and selling take a back seat to creative expression and letting it all hang out.

Sundance is so 1995.

ONEDOTZERO

If digital experimental film ever had an empire, this would be its home base. The uber-happening Institute of Contemporary Arts in London birthed one of the world’s first showcases of digital arts back in 1996 and things have not slowed since. Graphic design, music videos and video games are all inspiration for the wildly innovative filmmakers showing their work here. If new media and digital creativity is your bag, there’s nowhere else you should be.

ENCOUNTERS

The city of Bristol is home to the UK’s prolific animation industry (including those sly devils who brought us Wallace and Gromit). What better place for a premiere festival of shorts and animation to live? Short films are movies on speed – flashes of intense creativity compressed into small packages by up-and-coming filmmakers. And we ALL know that cartoons rock. Check out what one attendee called “Europe’s most youthful film festival.”

BRITDOC

Who says documentaries aren’t sexy? Those verbose and incisive Brits do real life better than anyone else. At BritDoc the quintessential college town of Oxford buzzes with the best of Britain’s independent documentary scene, including selections this year about university boxing rivalries, a Serbian trumpet festival and thoughts on 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep. Take in an open-air screening on the quad and ponder life in all its complexity.

BITE THE MANGO

Though peak mango season is finished by fall, a fresh crop of contemporary world cinema grows every September in Bradford. Located in the north of England, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television lives in one of the UK’s most diverse cities and knows that community is cinema’s heart and soul. World film thrives as Bite The Mango continues to demonstrate why the UK really is a portal to the globe.