The objectives of this article are to expand the stock of knowledge on the subject of social exclusion and film diversity policy in the British film industry, through the investigation of the concept of diversity and its dominant expressions in language and practice. Rather than about bringing about structural change, diversity policy under the UK film Council falsely separated exclusion from its broader, socio-political realities and proved deeply incompatible with the imperative of equality of opportunity. To this end, it will be argued that the concept of cultural capital, while underdeveloped, has a valuable and distinctive part to play in future policy research into social exclusion within the film sector.
Diversity' is an evolving dimension of discursive debates within publicly funded parts of the UK media. This article considers how representations of racial diversity in cinema were articulated in a particular moment in recent history. It traces the relationship between the broader New Labour neoliberal agenda of the late 1990s and the UK Film Council's (UKFC) New Cinema Fund, the key funding mechanism for supporting black British cinema at the time. The authors suggest that the New Cinema Fund's 'institutional diversity' agenda represented a symbolic effort by both the UKFC and UK public service broadcasters to redevelop black British film vis-a-vis a plethora of cultural imperatives oriented around the notion of 'social inclusion'. The nature of this intervention, it is argued, was strongly influenced by the 1999 Macpherson Report, which identified 'institutional racism' within the fabric of the UK's organisations. The article examines how such an 'institutional diversity' agenda emerged within the production context of a BBC Film/ UKFC production, Bullet Boy (2005), thus generating a rearticulated black British cinema that was deeply imbricated in the highly politicised contexts outlined.
This article traces the evolution of diversity policy in the British film industry and seeks to explore how the under-representation of BAME groups has been defined vis-à-vis shifting political discourses, in particular those emerging from the Conservative-dominated coalition government which came to power in 2010. This also enables an exploration of how various diversity issues have been addressed within the specifically depoliticised language used to articulate such inequalities within the film sector and an examination of whether recent developments in the British film industry are a genuine challenge to the exclusion of ethnic minorities in British film. At a moment when the diversity agenda has re-emerged, this article offers a critical examination of the ways in which specific political moments have influenced the production and grammar of contemporary diversity policy. The article concludes by offering an analysis of current diversity strategies devised from the beginning of the British Film Institute's role as the lead body for British film production in 2011 to the present day and traces out the patterns of decontextualisation, naturalisation and acquiescence which characterise such strategies.
In the early 2000s, a new form of multicultural television drama began to emerge in the UK, exploring contemporary gang life within Britain's black communities. A notable example of this ‘black urban crime’ genre is Top Boy, screened by the UK's leading multicultural public service broadcaster, Channel 4, in 2011 and 2013. This article produces an analysis, drawing on sociological and media studies perspectives, and through historicisation and contextualisation, that seeks to understand the fascination of the black urban crime genre for programme-makers, broadcasters and audiences in the contemporary British mediascape. It locates Top Boy at the intersection of complex media relations and modes of production that are themselves intertwined with political, legislative and cultural agendas tied to post-multiculturalist and neoliberal tendencies within public service broadcasting frameworks. The article suggests that black urban crime narratives do not advance understandings of the organisational structure of urban gangs or drug-related crime that are so central to these texts, nor do they offer a progressive contribution to contemporary debates or the representation of black criminality.
This article addresses the role of data in the analysis of racial diversity in the UK film industry. Due to the prolonged poor representation of racial difference, academic researchers increasingly identify the UK film sector as a particular site of multi-dimensional structural inequalities. This article will assess the impact of data-led interventions made by the UK film industry to increase the presence of BAME individuals within the sector. It will do this through an analysis of the policy approach of the UK’s lead body for film, the British Film Institute, examining how one major policy initiative, the BFI’s Diversity Standards launched in 2016 as an industry intervention into prevailing sector inequalities, has sought to achieve racial diversity and inclusion across its Film Fund-supported film productions between 2016 and 2019. Analysing cross-sectional data from 235 films which is aggregated across differing film genres, budgets and regions, the study assesses how the outcomes of the Diversity Standards have offered a representation of racial diversity across these production areas.
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