Luke W Moody, the former director of film programming at the UK’s Sheffield DocFest, has been named the head of the BFI Doc Society Fund at Doc Society.
In this role, Moody will lead the team in managing all aspects of the UK-wide BFI Doc Society Fund slate and will collaborate with Doc Society directors Shanida Scotland and Sandra Whipham on the strategic direction of Doc Society’s role as the BFI’s UK-wide delegate partner for documentary.
Scotland and Whipham had been managing the fund on an interim basis.
The BFI Doc Society Fund was launched in 2018, when Doc Society became the BFI’s delegate partner for independent UK documentary filmmaking. To date, it has distributed over £5.3m to UK independent documentary films, thanks to National Lottery funding. This year, Doc Society was reaffirmed as the BFI’s delegate partner for another three years with a further £6m commitment to support documentary funding across features and shorts, and a programme to support talent development.
Doc Society was founded in 2005 as a not-for-profit foundation supporting a network of documentary filmmakers with direct grants and editorial expertise. It has backed titles including Kathryn Ferguson’s Nothing Compares and Celeste Bell and Paul Sng’s PolyStyrene: I Am A Cliché.
Moody is a curator, producer and film executive, who has previously held posts such as creative director at arts organisation Abandon Normal Devices, and was director of film programming at Sheffield DocFest from 2016 to 2019.
He co-founded and curated London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) festival Frames of Representation and New Cinema Days Lab in Manchester and was head of film at Doc Society in 2016 (then Britdoc). His producer credits include Toronto premiere While We Watched, and he was a 2021 Sundance Producers’ Summit fellow and 2022 CPH:LAB participant.
Moody said: ”I’m pleased to come to a space where some of the most radical and fearless cinema exists. Through collective care, risk, and production I believe this fund is here to serve non-fiction filmmakers and artists to create and share a new culture of reflection, a cinema of questioning, and lasting images of the real.”
Scotland added: “The BFI Doc Society Fund is in a new and exciting phase – even more committed to enabling independent non-fiction filmmaking in the UK, being representative of all of UK society, building on a commitment to enable filmmakers to access freedom of creative expression and creative risk taking that expands the form and we are totally committed to ensuring audiences are able to access independent documentary filmmaking. In Luke we see someone who has a track record as a passionate champion for independent non-fiction film nationally and who continually prioritises making space for fresh and emerging talent. We are thrilled to work with Luke and excited to bring him into the team at this moment.”
“Luke’s career to date has engaged the full ecosystem of documentary film: commissioning, distribution, and producing at leading UK film and art institutions,” added director of BFI Filmmaking Fund Mia Bays, “and, as he cited in his interview, has throughout demonstrated a perpetual hunger for progressive culture in each position. We are excited to see what the new-look BFI Doc Society Fund does next with Luke in this key post.”
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