BFI Production Board

The BFI Production Board (1964-2000) was a state-funded film production fund managed by the British Film Institute (BFI) and "explicitly charged with backing work by new and uncommercial filmmakers." Emerging from the Experimental Film Fund, the BFI Production Board was a major source of funding for experimental, art house, animation, short and documentary cinema, with a continuing commitment to funding under-represented voices in filmmaking.

At its foundation in the 1930s, the BFI had no mandate to fund film production in the UK. However, the 1948 Radcliffe Report 'create[d] a more favourable climate for potential film production by recommending that the Institute should focus its activities exclusively on the promotion of film as an art form'. As part of the plans for the Festival of Britain in 1951, the BFI was allocated funding to produce a cinematic side of the festival, using £10,000 to commission several short experimental films "to be shown in the Telecinema, a temporary four-hundred seater cinema on the South Bank".

After the closure of the Crown Film Unit, there was no remaining state film funding body in the UK. When a new scheme, the Eady Levy, was introduced in December 1951, providing two grants of £12,500 to make experimental films for the Telecinema, the BFI invited producer Michael Balcon to chair the selection committee, and the Experimental Film Fund was created. It received no further funding from the BFI, and offered scant support despite its ambitions. "The first projects considered were in the fields of stereoscopic technology and art documentaries." But this changed through the emergence of the Free Cinema movement, which included a number of young filmmakers - Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Walter Lassally who were prominent contributors to the BFI's magazine Sight & Sound. The Experimental Film Fund supported Free Cinema films such as Reisz and Richardson's Momma Don't Allow, Lorenza Mazetti's Together (1956), and Lloyd Reckord's Ten Bob in Winter (1963), the first British film by a black filmmaker.

...
Wikipedia