The festival will take place on 26 and 27 September and will bring together audiovisual creators, tourism professionals and lovers of travel cinema
Dates: 26–27 September 2026
Venue: Cardona
Cardona, September 2026. — Cardona will become the setting for the third edition of the Travel Film Awards (TFA) on 26 and 27 September, an international festival that explores the relationship between cinema and travel and champions the power of audiovisual stories to make territories, cultures and more responsible ways of travelling known.
After its first editions, the Travel Film Awards arrive this year in Cardona with a programme that combines cinema, tourism, heritage and cultural experiences, in a municipality that holds one of Catalonia’s most distinctive heritage ensembles and belongs to a network of destinations with a strong connection to cinema and audiovisual culture.
The festival gives prominence to audiovisual productions that take travel and tourism as their thematic axis. This year’s programme includes films of between 3 and 30 minutes, in fiction, documentary and animation, from different countries. The selection brings together filmmakers of diverse origins and levels of experience, combining emerging and relatively new voices with more established filmmakers.
Beyond screenings, the Travel Film Awards create a meeting space for filmmakers, tourism professionals, institutions and audiences, with activities such as projections, conversations with creators, talks, workshops and networking.
The programme also invites participants to discover Cardona through two of its most emblematic places: the Castle of Cardona, explored through the gaze of Orson Welles, who filmed Chimes at Midnight there in 1964, and the Salt Mountain, a natural and cultural site unique in Europe.
“Cinema has an extraordinary capacity to tell the story of territories, bring us closer to other cultures and awaken the desire to discover new places. From the Travel Film Awards we want to highlight this power of travel stories and contribute, through cinema, to imagining a more conscious, responsible and sustainable way of travelling.”
— Masih Sharif, Founder and Director of TFA
The festival was born to highlight a relationship that is increasingly important: the one between the stories we see on screen and the places we then want to know.
In this sense, the Travel Film Awards incorporate the concept of screen tourism — tourism linked to filming locations and cinematic imaginaries — and present cinema as a tool for territorial promotion, but also as an instrument to foster intercultural dialogue and give visibility to responsible tourism models. Among the festival’s awards are the Golden Carry-on, the highest recognition of the festival, as well as prizes for best film (jury), screen tourism and the audience mention.
The celebration of the festival in Cardona will also coincide with World Tourism Day, observed every year on 27 September — a particularly significant coincidence for a festival whose central axis is tourism and its narratives.
The arrival of the Travel Film Awards also strengthens Cardona’s projection as a destination linked to cultural, heritage and cinematic tourism. The municipality preserves an extraordinary historical heritage, with the Castle of Cardona and the Salt Mountain as its main icons, and offers a unique setting for a festival that seeks precisely to connect audiovisual stories with the territories that inspire them.
“The arrival of the Travel Film Awards is an extraordinary opportunity to take a further step in this commitment to screen tourism and to place Cardona as a meeting point between the audiovisual and tourism worlds. Hosting a festival that champions precisely this connection allows us to share our experience as a filming location and, at the same time, discover new ways of telling and projecting Cardona through the screen.”
— Francesc Ponsa, Director of the Fundació Cardona Històrica
Over the weekend of 26 and 27 September, Cardona will thus become a meeting point for creators and professionals interested in new ways of telling travel and destinations through the screen.
SET-JET 25 – the first-ever World Screen Tourism Summit, welcomed over 200 international leaders from the screen tourism, film & TV, gaming, and hospitality sectors under one roof.
The event took place at the ICC Birmingham on Friday 21 November 2025, with an optional Set-Jet dinner the night before at the prestigious Birmingham Council House Banqueting Suite.
The day-long programme included main stage sessions, in-depth seminars, and forward-looking panels designed to share insights into how screen exposure is driving global travel and how the industry can leverage this trend further as it continues to build momentum.
Patricia Yates, CEO of VisitBritain set the tone for the event highlighting the growing relationship between what people are seeing on screen and travel, with 9 in 10 visitors wanting to explore places in the UK from their favourite films and TV series.
This was followed by a keynote session with British Film Commission’s CEO, Adrian Wootton OBE, and CEO of Left Bank Pictures, Andy Harries OBE who discussed the popularity of The Crown and Outlander as ‘set - jetting’ destinations.
Attendees also heard from a variety of sector leading speakers, covering all areas of screen tourism.
Five top takeaways from the summit were:
Martin Evans, SET-JET 25 creator and Managing Partner of The Tourism Business, said:
“There was a real excitement in the air at the first instalment of The World Screen Tourism Summit about where screen tourism is headed. Our aim for the event was to create a forum where the sector could come together from across the world to hear from a strong line-up of international speakers, share their valuable insights and play an important role in the growth of the sector.
The success of the event and the interest in Set-Jet 25 from the film community, location agents, venues, hotels and beyond shows that film and TV is only going to grow as a powerful motivator for why and where people travel.”