BFI's Ben Roberts Maps the Future of British Independent Film at Edinburgh's First UK Film Conference
The British Film Institute has £150 million ($203m) to spend over the next three years, and its chief executive used the Edinburgh Film Festival's inaugural UK Film Conference to explain how that money shapes the next generation of British cinema.
Ben Roberts, CEO of the BFI, sat for a ninety-minute keynote conversation with Clare Binns, creative director of the Picturehouse cinema chain, on Saturday 15 August at Central Hall in Edinburgh. The session opened the festival's first-ever UK Film Conference — a single-day industry event added to the Edinburgh International Film Festival's programme, which this year runs 13–19 August. Screen Daily reported the conference announcement in June.
Much of the BFI's funding comes from government grants and National Lottery revenue. Roberts was careful to draw a line around his own organisation: the BFI distributes lottery money but cannot apply for it itself. Instead, it supports other distributors with those funds, with clear targets on how the cash is spread across the UK.
Roberts pointed to the films that lottery backing has made possible. He named Kevin Macdonald's 2013 feature How I Live Now, which starred a young Tom Holland, and Paddy Considine's 2011 Tyrannosaur, which gave Olivia Colman her first standout dramatic role — a turn that moved her from sketch comedy into serious film work. The message: public funding can seed careers that the commercial market has not yet noticed.
On genre, Roberts was blunt. The UK independent sector, he said, is not great at comedy. Audiences love horror, but the sector pulls its punches in both genres. He also argued that films do not have to be designed for commercial success, citing Tea Shop Productions — run by James Harris and Mark Lane — as the company behind Curry Barker's Obsession, a project that exists outside the conventional commercial calculus.
The conversation ranged wide. Roberts and Binns covered the BFI's audience development fund, called Escapes, and discussed cinema-chain pricing models and support from the UK's Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Both framed cinemas as community hubs that contribute to the high-street economy, not just as places to watch films.
Politics made an appearance too. Binns asked Roberts about new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, whose early weeks in office have been defined by a push to move political power out of London and toward the north of England. Roberts noted that BFI staff have been distributed across the UK since COVID, and that the organisation is London-centric only in the sense that the BFI IMAX sits in the capital. The BFI's five buildings include two London cinemas, an office, and two archive buildings in other parts of England.
For anyone who cares about which British films reach a screen, the takeaway is structural. The BFI's £150 million is not a single bet on a single film. It is a distribution system — lottery revenue, targeted across regions, aimed at films and filmmakers the commercial market may overlook. Roberts's examples, from Holland to Colman, are the proof of concept.
