Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Creativitys.UK; film critic and documentary director.
Every October the same thing happens in London. The cameras follow the red carpet at the Royal Festival Hall, and the conversations that decide what we will be watching in two or three years take place a few streets away, in rooms without a single photographer. This year those rooms are at Picturehouse Central, where the Industry Forum of the 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from 8 to 15 October. The full programme was announced on 22 September. Read carefully, it is less a list of panels than a map of where British cinema thinks it is going.
Producers in the spotlight
It says something that two of the three headline conversations belong to producers rather than directors. Producers carry a film for years before anyone sees it, and they rarely get the microphone.
James Wilson opens the week on 8 October, in conversation with the journalist Danny Leigh. His thirty years in independent production run from Under the Skin and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here to the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. These are films that take risks with form and trust the audience to keep up.
James Wilson. Photo: Peter Searle, courtesy of BFI.
On 12 October Pippa Harris talks to Edith Bowman. Her record, with 1917 and Hamnet, would be enough for any career, but the real reason to be in that room is what she is making now: through her company Neal Street, a quartet of Beatles films directed by Sam Mendes, currently in production. Four films about one band, conceived as a single project, is the kind of gamble only a producer can explain.
Pippa Harris. Photo: Taylor Hill, courtesy of BFI.
Boyle, in public
Between them sits the booking I would not miss. On 9 October Danny Boyle is interviewed by Matt Belloni for The Town podcast, about the state of the UK industry and about Ink, his Murdoch drama, which opened Venice this month. Boyle has worked at every scale the business offers, from Shallow Grave to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, and Belloni covers the business end of Hollywood with little patience for publicity talk. The combination promises a frank hour.
Danny Boyle. Courtesy of BFI.
The next morning, 10 October, belongs to craft. The costume designer PC Williams, known for We Are Lady Parts and My Father’s Shadow, talks to the British-Nigerian filmmaker and visual artist Akinola Davies Jr about moving between genres and making room for emerging talent. It is a small session with a large subject. A costume is often the first thing that tells us who a character is, long before the first line of dialogue.
PC Williams. Courtesy of BFI.
The working rooms
The Forum opens on 8 October with the people who choose what we see. Ben Lyndon of Curzon, Carol McKay of Picturehouse and Madeleine Mullett of BFI IMAX look at audience trends after a season that ran from Obsession to The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I like that the week begins here. Before anyone discusses what to make, someone has to explain what people actually went out to watch.
The rest of the week follows the money and the material. On 12 October producers from Ireland, Spain, Norway and Brazil discuss what co-production gives and what it costs. On 13 October the directors Theo Rollason, Nanette Burstein and Rafael Guendelman sit with Simon McCallum of the BFI National Archive to talk about building stories from found footage, in a session hosted by Sheffield DocFest. On 11 October the fourth edition of Fade In presents six new screenwriters, introduced by Holly Daniel of Take Three. And on 15 October LFF Expanded holds its Industry Day, with works in progress such as DARKFIELD’s participatory audio piece Pilgrims and a solarpunk Peter and the Wolf in augmented reality, alongside funding surgeries with three BFI funds.
Why it matters
Behind the panels there is quieter work. In the New Waves meetings, twelve experienced French producers sit down with UK counterparts to look for shared projects, organised by the BFI and the CNC. For British filmmakers, that corridor to Europe can matter more than any single talk.
Silvia Angrisani, the festival’s industry programme manager, describes the aim as bringing together “filmmakers at the top of their game” with “cinema programmers taking the pulse” of audiences. It is the right ambition. I would judge the Forum by a simpler test: whether people leave a room with a collaborator they did not have when they walked in.
Industry passes start at £85 and are open to UK and international professionals; the full programme is on the BFI website. The carpet will get the photographs. The Forum gets the future.
