Film Council funding
March 10, 2010
So after their great public consultation closing on the 9th Febuary, the new Film Council set-up with Head Tanya Seghatchian was announced on the 10th February. Which was quick.
But if this was a done deal beforehand, as long as she’s right for the job, I don’t think we need to complain too much. One thing that did strike me however, was from a line in the Guardian coverage of her appointment and the combining of the funding strands:
“The UKFC intends to top-up the £15m annual fund with money it recoups from its investments, which are expected to provide at least another £2m a year.”
£2m a year? So previously we had the Premiere Fund, with a chest of £8m in production financing, the New Cinema Fund, with £5m a year, and the Development Fund with £4m a year. Now you could say that the Development Fund was purely a fund for encouraging writers and producers to spend longer on development to improve films, and that the money was in the way of a grant, and unlikely to be returned, which is being generous to say the least, but I wanted to concentrate on the production funds here.
The New Cinema Fund was the more cultural side of funding, encouraging excellence, innovation etc. etc. but there are some pretty successful titles in there, including recently: In the Loop, Man On Wire, This Is England, Adulthood etc. You could understand if the films the fund invested in didn’t all make money, but undoubtedly some of them should have and did. Maybe 20% of the films made their money back? If so, that should be £1m a year coming in from the New Cinema Fund’s investments.
N0w the Premiere Fund with its £8 of funding a year, was never meant to be a token cultural gesture. This was all about boosting the industry, backing successful British films, boosting post-production facilities and film crews. According to their website, they backed on average 8-9 films a year. That’s £1m per film give or take some loose change. And in total the Film Council are only getting back £2m a year? Even if the New Cinema Fund investments didn’t provide any return, that’s only 2 out of 8-9 films making their money back. And whilst you might not be thrilled by The Film Council investing it’s money into films like St Trinian’s, with a sequel in the pipeline the film surely made enough money to repay it’s investors. Ok, there are several flops in the list of films invested in (full list here) but out of about 56 films, at least 10 did some serious box office, and several haven’t even been released yet.
So where’s the money? Are the Film Council not strong enough to negotiate good returns from their investments? Or are they happy for the producers to hide away all the profits and not receive their investment back? Either way, if they’re expecting just a return of £2m on £17m investment, then it would seem that this is a glorified pot of money with no strings attached. Which leads to the question of what criteria these investments in the Premiere Fund are being judged on? Sex Lives of the Potato Men and St Trinians? L’Homme du Train? Curious…
