Rishi Coupland

Source: BFI

Rishi Coupland

The BFI’s third round of funding for its Innovation Challenge Fund has set aside £200,000 for not-for-profit organisations to accelerate research and innovation around equity, diversity and inclusion data.

This funding call aims to address the need for research and development for a system across film production that captures the majority of workforce data to enable industry to better understand and drive improvements in diversity of cast and crews.

The BFI is hoping to keep the offer open to a range of applicants, from organisations and projects that are already engaged in similar work in the sector, to data management specialists and research focused agencies, or even parties in academia. Deadline for applications is January 21 2025.

The £1.8m BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund was set up to tackle up to six critical challenges in the screen sector and run from 2023-2026. This is the third round of funding, following the initial iteration targeted at the UK video games industry and the second for AI-focused innovation in screen archiving.

“Much good work has been done over recent years by public funders and agencies and by commercial organisations in capturing diversity monitoring data, in order to better understand and address the diversity of the UK’s film production workforce,” said Rishi Coupland, BFI director of research and industry innovation.

“Making further and ongoing improvements in EDI [equity, diversity and inclusion] will require the best possible monitoring systems – and that in turn will need excellence in design, bringing forward the best minds in technology, user-centred tools and deep knowledge of the sector.”