When Stuart Brown came out of the 8am screening of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Competition title EO at Cannes in 2022, he called producer Jeremy Thomas to let him know how much he liked the film and within two hours had secured the UK rights to the film for BFI Distribution.
As head of programme and acquisitions at the BFI, Brown has led the organisation’s distribution arm since 2016 but it was not until that morning that he felt it had all come together. “I finally felt validated, like I was properly part of the film industry. I did a deal for a Cannes Competition film, walking up and down the Croisette,” he laughs.
But securing a film that quickly is unusual for BFI Distribution as it does not have quite the same commercial imperative to act quickly like other distributors. “Our job is to enrich film culture in the UK,” Brown explains. “We don’t have a mandate to be competitive or drive business. We’re not endeavouring to compete in the marketplace. We’re benevolent and we’re there to support a greater cause.”
This typically means working alongside other distributors, not against them. “There will be moments where we’re competing, but on the whole we’re working in partnership, we’re in touch with them all the time,” says Brown.
That can mean BFI Distribution will hold back from bidding to allow commercial distributors with deeper pockets to take a film, says Brown. “We do pause to see what the market does,” Brown explains. “There are a lot of films that we love but feel quite confident are going to be snapped up for UK distribution. In which case that’s great, they don’t need us.
“But when the market doesn’t respond quickly [to a film], then we do. If we feel a project is right for our business and our audiences, then we will move fast.”
Brown moved fast for Cannes Critics’ Week opener Ama Gloria, directed by France’s Marie Amachoukeli, which BFI Distribution picked up from Pyramide International right after the festival. It will be released in 2024.
However, Koji Fukada’s Love Life took slightly longer. The film first played at Venice in 2022 and was only bought by BFI Distribution in June 2023. “The [UK] market didn’t want it, so we didn’t pay an eye-watering amount for it,” says Brown.
Love Life will be released in UK-Ireland cinemas on September 15 this year, tied into a retrospective on Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, a major influence on Fukada. “We’re trying to create this conversation between the past and the present, using contemporary cinema and all of the BFI’s levers and different platforms to open up a dialogue with filmmakers about their influences,” says Brown of the approach the BFI can take to a release strategy.
Brown heads a three-person acquisitions division with Julie Pearce, head of distribution and programmme operations, and Laura dos Santos, acquisitions manager. “We’re in touch all day, every day,” says Brown. Together they split the key festivals between them. Pearce and dos Santos do Berlin; Brown and dos Santos go to Cannes; with Pearce covering Toronto. Brown reports to Jason Wood, who as executive director of public programmes and audiences sits on the BFI executive board, and oversees all audience-facing BFI activity.
Brown regularly attends Sheffield DocFest and colleagues from other BFI departments, such as the Southbank’s programming team and John Ramchandani’s physical media team, attend further festivals, reporting back to Brown, Pearce and dos Santos.
BFI Distribution’s budget comes from core BFI funding, which is a combination of grant-in-aid and self-generated income, and is separate from the organisation’s National Lottery-funded activities. (Brown declined to give any details of the annual budget or what the distributor pays for films.) Any revenues generated by BFI Distribution titles go back into the BFI’s overall budget.
Physical attraction
Since its launch in the 1980s, BFI Distribution released mostly retrospective titles until 2016 when the arm fell under the remit of Brown, who joined the organisation in 1998. Brown has since cultivated a focus on UK identity through a release slate that runs at a steady 12 to 15 films a year. Of the 12 this year, eight are new releases, including Dionne Edwards’ Pretty Red Dress on June 16 (it has grossed £49,099 as of July 9), and Edward Lovelace’s documentary about a young deaf Kurdish boy who comes to the UK, Name Me Lawand, which opened this weekend.
In late October, BFI Distribution is releasing UK director Joanna Hogg’s ghost story The Eternal Daughter starring Tilda Swinton, the company’s latest pick-up from A24 following God’s Creatures earlier this year for which BFI bought UK rights (Volta Distribution released in Ireland.) As of July 2, God’s Creatures had grossed £248,000 in the UK. The Eternal Daughter is part of the distributor’s efforts to provide “a flavour of all different types of the experience of being British”, says Brown, and is indicative of its changing focus towards contemporary, audience-facing UK fare.
Further upcoming releases include Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s feature doc Scala!!! Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits, about the legendary London cinema which operated from 1978 to 1993, and Sacha Polak’s Silver Haze, the semi-autobiographical story of its UK star, Vicky Knight.
The success BFI Distribution enjoyed with Mark Jenkin’s micro-budget 2019 drama Bait motivated the shift in strategy. Bait grossed £536,532 in the UK and Ireland for BFI Distribution and was a huge subscription driver on BFI Player, according to Brown. The distribution arm extended its relationship with the Cornish filmmaker on his second feature Enys Men which grossed £311,000 earlier this year in the UK.
Back catalogue titles remain a key part of the BFI Distribution slate, tied into wider programming where possible. For example, a 4K remaster of Mike Leigh’s 1993 Naked accompanied by a selection of his films playing at the flagship BFI Southbank venue in late 2021. “He came down every single night of the week to introduce and do Q&As,” says Brown of the director.
This year Rashomon was re-released in January 2023 and has grossed £94,000, Get Carter took £56,800 following a May re-release and Dance Craze came out in March 2023 and is still playing with a £85,907 gross to date. Upcoming titles include Horace Ove’s 1976 Pressure later this year, restored by the BFI National Archive.
Now Hogg is selecting a programme of her cinematic influences to play at the Southbank around the release of The Eternal Daughter in late October.
Being able to rely on strong talent relationships such as those the BFI enjoys with Hogg and Jenkin, its experience of hosting events and Q&As through its exhibition arm, and the ability to produce physical media play a big part in attracting filmmakers to BFI Distribution.
“You’d be surprised how attractive it is to a director to have their film on a Blu-ray,” says Brown. “They still really want that physical object.”
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