About
Carmen Thompson is a film programmer and cultural producer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She works freelance and consultants across programming, audiences, festivals, training and development, funding and distribution, both in the UK and internationally. Her interests centre around cinema from the African continent and the Black diaspora, perhaps most specifically at their intersections with non-fiction storytelling.
Carmen currently works as Head Distribution & Special Projects for multi-award winning film exhibition & distribution company We Are Parable where she leads on nationwide and international projects, including the releases of Banel & Adama (Ramata-Toulaye Sy, 2023) and Dreamers (Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, 2025) in the UK and Ireland. She is one third of the newly-formed Jali Collective in Scotland and is deputy chair of British Independent Film Awards (BIFA).
Carmen has previously worked as a programme consultant for Sheffield DocFest and programmer of Sub-Saharan African Film at Red Sea Film Festival, as well as a producer at international sales & distribution company Aya Films, working on the UK releases of films such as the award-winning Somali film The Gravedigger’s Wife (Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, 2021) and Kenyan film Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018). Aya Films also work across media education and in 2021 Carmen worked on the development of curatorial learning app Curate-It.
In her 10 years in film exhibition and distribution, Carmen has worked with a range of organisations including Durban FilmMart, European Film Market, AfroBerlin, Africa in Motion Film Festival (Co-director, 2020), Realness Institute, Wellcome, Scottish Documentary Institute, The Africa Channel, New Black Film Collective, Cinema Rediscovered and London Film School, and has recently served on film juries for the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival, European Film Awards, BlackStar Film Festival and Cork International Film Festival.
Carmen was voted a Screen International Future Leader, announced at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. She is a BAFTA, BAFTA Scotland and European Film Academy voting member.
Photo Credit: George Pimentel