Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet

We all have that one YouTube video we’re obsessed with. Or that one vine that we think about more than most movies.

Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet is the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend's one-night-only programme of digital delights on the big screen, showcasing the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet. From vlogs to memes to completely unclassifiable internet oddities, these videos might not have been made for the cinema – but if they’re the clips we can quote by heart and replay in our heads forever, doesn’t that kind of make them just as iconic?

Our relationship with the internet is personal. There’s no official “greatest hits” list like there is with films – just the rabbit holes we fall down, the creators we love, and the clips we can’t stop thinking about. To put this programme together, the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend gathered a group of chronically online young curators in Bristol to lead us down their own favourite rabbit holes, shaping the programme around their own sense of local identity. In addition, by partnering with the BFI National Archive, they have been able to explore and select some of this programme from their own online moving image collections.

This screening will be followed by a discussion with creator Paul Weedon (of "I can't believe you've done this" fame) whose work features in the showcase, digging into how he think about his viral video as ‘art’, crafting an online identity, and living under the shadow of your digital footprint. 

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