British Film Institute (BFI) chief executive Ben Roberts and deputy CEO and executive director of corporate and industry affairs Harriet Finney addressed the skills push, the diversification of the BFI’s remit and changes to the Film Fund that have resulted from the new BFI 10-year strategy, during the latest episode of the ScreenDaily Talks webinar series.

Watch the full session above

Roberts and Finney dug into Screen Culture 2033, the BFI’s new 10-year corporate roadmap, and the National Lottery strategy for investing ‘good cause’ funding, published last week.

“As we were building the strategy, we had a cost-of-living crisis emerging and growing, and the moment we launch the strategy, we now have a currency crisis as well,” noted Finney. “Lottery funding is not there to answer all those questions, but we have anchored this strategy around public benefit, thinking about the benefit we can make to an individual’s lives. Where we might have been thinking about organisational support [before], this is anchored in the cultural and social benefit that lottery funding can bring to the sector.”

Skills push

One of the key ambitions of Screen Culture 2033 is to develop long-term strategies around education and skills, to help address the industry’s skills shortage. The corporate strategy states an aim to “negotiate an industry commitment of 1% of overall production spend towards UK-wide skills development”.

Roberts clarified that there is not an intention to bring in a mandatory 1% skills levy to production spend in the UK: “We haven’t approached it from a levying perspective. At the heart of Screen Culture is a determination to have the opportunity and the benefit understood from school age upwards, so everyone understands the sheer range of opportunities that are available, that I don’t think are well understood, and that will meet the challenge of the sector.

“It’s a nice problem to have. It feels like an incredibly attractive sector to enter, we’ve got loads of jobs, we just need to close that gap now. Our lottery money, which for quite a long did a lot of the heavy lifting, such as through partnerships with ScreenSkills, is key, but it’s not enough…. We’ve reached a point where it is industrial level training and a communication job that’s needed.”

“Voluntary is where we’re starting,” said Finney of the 1%. “There are lots of brilliant initiatives [within the industry] already being run,” she added, stating a task and finish group would be set up with the DCMS [department for digital, culture, media and sport] in October to further look at how get the industry on board with the 1% .

Finney described the skills shortage as a “£100m problem” with the BFI able to use its position sitting between government and industry to look “creatively” at ways to address the issue, in the absence of National Lottery funding on its own being able to solve the overarching problem. Finney highlighted the new Skills Clusters, with £9m of National Lottery funding across the first three years, as a way of offering support to local industries at a de-centralised level, allowing screen organisations to take the lead on skills and training in their areas across the UK.

Reassurance for indie filmmakers

Roberts and Finney endeavoured to reassure independent filmmakers, regarding the strategy’s commitment to further exploring video games, XR and VR, alongside a reduction in overall National Lottery funding – there is a 10% smaller pot of funding for the first three years of Screen Culture 2033 than for the last three-year period under previous strategy, BFI2022.

“When we embarked on the consultation around the strategy, there was a lot of anxiety from our traditional beneficiary community from independent film, filmmakers and producers, who were rightly worried we were diluting what is already a challenged place. We went into the process with our eyes wide open around that. The strategy is outlining what we need to do, before we can fully engage [with the video games sector],” said Roberts.

“We haven’t got the funding, we’re very clear on that, when it comes to investing and making video games, but it’s about thinking about how we can set out the cultural significance of games,” added Finney, pointing towards the upcoming video games skills review as an example of how the BFI can “play to policy and research strengths” and “dip our toes in” to unearth where there is market failure within the video games sector, that the BFI can bolster with support.

BFI Filmmaking Fund

While exact details are not going to be announced until early 2023 of the BFI Filmmaking Fund strategy, headed up by Mia Bays, Roberts hinted at the key issues that came out of Bays’ consultation process: “There was a gap in provision around higher budgeted shorts, and there were some rungs missing in the ladder she was keen to close. She’s very focused on access and equality of opportunity.

“There was a bit of scrutiny around who are we making films for? How do you balance talent development, where the audience can be quite small, and the desire of the audiences of the films to feel larger and more commercial? Mia will be really good at squaring that away.

“There was a strong sense from the people who access the funds to, please, make it easier,” Roberts continued. ”There’s always a certain amount of form filling involved in applying for public funding, but we have made commitments in the strategy to being good partners and only asking for information we can do something with. We’re going on a journey of looking at our forms and evaluation process to make it feel less ’barriered’.”

The birth of BFI+

Roberts and Finney expanded on the plans to evolve BFI Player into BFI+. Roberts confirmed the aim to position BFI+ as a major source of income and competitor in the streaming market. “’Digital first’ is key to this cultural imperative,” said Roberts. “It’s potentially a significant source of income for the BFI. We’ve got a good streaming audience and a good base of subscribers. We’ve done a lot of work to model the growth in that potential audience. We are in significant need of income growth generation for ourselves. Player to ‘+’ is less about a linear streaming service, and more about how you can access more of the BFI in multiple ways.”

The business model for investment is still being developed. “It won’t be something we can fund from our existing envelope,” said Roberts, who also confirmed his desire for BFI+ to be active in the acquisition sphere. 

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