Setting the scene

We are a community of over 700 people who are passionate and knowledgeable about film, television and the moving image. And we are committed to ensuring a positive and accessible screen culture for all.

Our people work in one of the following areas:

• Public Programmes & Audiences
• Knowledge & Collections
• Corporate & Industry Affairs
• Technology & Digital Transformation
• Fundraising & Enterprise
• Finance, People & Business Operations
• Chief Executive’s Office

We currently operate five sites:

BFI Southbank

Originally opened in 1957 as the UK’s National Film Theatre, this is our main public venue. It hosts four cinema screens, the BFI Reuben Library, our mediatheque, exhibition spaces, bars and restaurants.

BFI IMAX

Our iconic single-screen IMAX cinema contains the biggest screen in the UK at 20 by 26 metres. It is frequently one of the best-performing IMAX sites in the world.

BFI J Paul Getty Jnr Conservation Centre

The BFI National Archive’s main 11-acre site, at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. It contains interconnected collections storage, laboratories and bespoke collections processing buildings.

BFI Master Film Store

Our 21-acre site in Warwickshire, near Gaydon, provides state-of- the-art storage facilities. It holds the national collection of film masters, as well as other key collections from our partners.

BFI Stephen Street

Our headquarters in central London since 1987, home to two viewing theatres and specialist research viewing facilities.

We actively recruit from across the UK and encourage our people to use any of our sites as creative places for collaboration, problem-solving and socialising. We believe everyone will choose the right environment and time for the work they do and when they need to do it.

As a registered charity, established by Royal Charter, we are governed by a Board of up to 15 Governors. They bring a range of business and creative insights, and contribute significant expertise from across the screen industries. They include representatives from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

We want to create the conditions in which screen culture and the UK’s screen industries can thrive – across the UK and around the world.

We do this by:

• Growing and caring for the BFI National Archive, the world’s largest film and television archive.
• Offering the widest range of UK and international screen culture to audiences through our online and in-venue programmes and festivals.
• Using our knowledge to educate and deepen public appreciation and understanding of film, TV and the moving image.
• Supporting creativity and actively seeking out the next generation of UK creators.
• Working with the government and industry to ensure the continued growth of the UK’s screen industries.

We are committed to promoting appreciation of the widest possible range of UK and world cinema. We also establish, care for and develop accessible collections of moving image heritage.

We do this in collaboration with a range of partner organisations, screen agencies, local and devolved governments across the UK – working together to make sure BFI support is tailored to differing needs and political contexts of each of the devolved nations.

However, as content production and distribution globalise, UK-made work has become less prominent. That makes our role in encouraging and reflecting the UK’s diversity of cultures, languages, landscapes and perspectives more crucial than ever.

Through this strategy, we will amplify our focus on UK work. We will celebrate the full breadth of the UK’s screen culture past and present, and promote it internationally.

This focus will be evident in our cultural and educational programmes, our distribution and publishing, our heritage and contemporary acquisitions, and our support for the UK independent film sector. It will affect every part of how we champion UK independent creators through our funding, policy drives and international promotion.

Our work abroad is more critical than ever. We must ensure there is a healthy and harmonious domestic production sector and an open door to international collaboration. We must grow a strong global marketplace for audiences who enjoy the quality and diversity of UK screen culture. And we must promote robust knowledge exchanges with our international peers to explore the future of the moving image.

We will achieve much of this work in collaboration and partnership with other organisations around the world. The BFI is a founding member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and European Film Agency Directors (EFAD). By working hand-in-hand with the British Council, the Department for International Trade and other agencies, we currently deliver a range of vital soft-power-focused activity which boost the UK’s cultural influence overseas. The BFI London Film Festival, for example, is a highlight of the international calendar and a key convening moment for creative talent and international business.

Finally, we will ensure that our thought leadership continues to be internationally recognised and opens up outstanding opportunities for collaboration. This applies across our publications, research, film productions, festivals and public programmes, heritage and educational initiatives, and diversity and inclusion programmes.

At the BFI we are driven by a collective purpose:

We believe society needs stories. Film, television and the moving image bring them to life, helping us to connect and understand each other better. We share the stories of yesterday, search for the stories of today, and shape the stories of tomorrow.

This purpose is built on:

Storytelling

The moving image brings stories to life, helping us all see the world through different lenses – so that we can understand each other better.

Choice

We stand for choice and difference. We champion over 100 years of the moving image in all its forms to create the greatest possible choice, access and opportunity for all.

Opportunity

We work to keep screen culture vibrant. We drive the industry forward, inspire the artistic evolution of future talent, and expand the possibilities of storytelling.

Discovery

We help people get more out of their screen culture. We place it at the heart of our cultural lives for all to discover and delight in, and use it to teach us about the past, present and future.

Connection

We use the transformative power of screen culture for social good. We tell stories and start conversations that bring people and communities closer together.

We will transform access to our programmes, screen culture and jobs across the whole of the UK.

We will do this by focusing on the diversity of our audiences, expanding our work to fully embrace television and video games, reframing the public’s relationship with the BFI’s collections, investing in the growth of our digital platforms and working with the industry to deliver long-term strategies for education, skills and net zero.

Our strategy builds upon this vision through our six ambitions.

Our work will be underpinned by three cross-cutting principles: a commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion; ensuring that our work reaches across the nations and regions of the UK so that everyone can benefit; and by reducing our environmental impact and leading the sector towards net zero.

We will measure the success of our work against these three principles.

We want everyone to develop a meaningful relationship with film and the moving image, regardless of their background or circumstances. Representation, accessibility and accountability lie at the centre of this strategy.

We believe in long-term interventions which are measurable, iterative and adaptable. By working in partnership with communities and marginalised groups, we can draw on their lived experience to deliver our work authentically and accessibly.

Our priorities are:

Long-standing discrimination across the screen sectors has created barriers for Black, and ethnically diverse people. Sadly, this includes the experiences of colleagues at the BFI. By working with experts to embed anti-racism and accountability into our processes and provide training for our people, we hope to create long-term, sustained interventions. These will enable us to dismantle racism and champion best practice for the wider sector.

Prioritising disability and d/Deaf equality is a key but historically underdeveloped area of inclusion work. There remains a significant gap in understanding ableism and its negative impacts on representation. We have adopted the social model of disability including neurodivergence and relevant mental health diagnoses in our definition. We also partner with our Disability Screen Advisory Group to influence and shape our activity. We are led by the disabled community’s mantra, “Nothing about us without us.”

We want everyone to feel included in the activity of the BFI, and that means looking at access and accessibility in the broadest sense. We consider physical access to our buildings, online access to our digital programmes and ensuring our work is felt in every region and nation of the UK crucial. We are committed to improving access to our digital platform and add closed captioning to all digital video services. And we will continue to remove the financial barriers that limit anyone’s ability to participate.

Our long-term inclusion efforts are led by our Diversity Standards and our Guidance and Principles to prevent Bullying, Harassment and Racism, and we are committed to the development and expansion of these policies.

We ask all our partners to engage with us in these areas and we are committed to reporting against our Inclusion Targets using self-declared data from our people and those we fund. This will continue to help us identify specific areas of focus for under-representation where progress in our industry has been particularly slow, such as ethnicity and disability. While we are also aware of the progress still needed in achieving gender equality, and ensuring all members of the LGBTQIA+ community are supported and represented. Intersectionality is key, recognising that personal identities are individual, intertwined and complex.

Everyone across the four nations of the UK should be able to experience and create the widest range of moving image storytelling. Economic growth and access to jobs should be felt UK-wide.

Screen culture has a huge role to play in shaping our collective identity as a country. It can help us explore the rich diversity of UK life across every nation and region.

But we know that the cultural and economic opportunities on offer are unbalanced. The range of exhibitors and stories on screen varies considerably between different areas of the UK, and people can face barriers to access both in terms of proximity to venues and digital connectivity.

We also know that screen businesses and infrastructure are concentrated within London and the South East of England. That makes it harder for others to access education, skills and training opportunities. It is also harder to pursue careers in the sector, establish sustainable businesses and develop local networks.

As a result, the full economic benefit of screen sector activity is felt unequally across the UK. We must address this imbalance of opportunity. In the course of the next 10 years, we will make sure that all our funded activity works together to provide UK-wide opportunities to experience, create and work in film, TV and the moving image. We will support the Government’s levelling-up agenda. And we will coordinate closely with screen agencies in regions and devolved nations to align our funding strategies.

Within our organisation we are also committed to looking at opportunities to grow our people presence across the UK. To support this, we are adapting our recruitment practices to actively seek out and promote a UK-wide recruitment approach. This is already bearing fruit with a number of senior appointments made outside the South East. Similarly, our Screen Archive of the Future research will widen public access to the BFI National Archive outside of London and the South East.

The world faces a climate and ecological emergency, and the screen sectors have an important role to play in addressing this. If we are to reduce our environmental impact and support wider industry efforts to get to net zero, we must enact systemic changes.

This means changes across all our activities, our buildings, behaviour, National Lottery funding portfolio, and our programming decisions.

By engaging with themes of environmental sustainability and the climate crisis, stories on screen can make a difference. They can help impress the importance of reducing humanity’s impact on the planet and they can show the many realistic ways in which the public and society can contribute. Storytelling can unite people from all backgrounds around this common cause. We will use our festivals, programme and BFI Player to help creators promote greater awareness of our climate emergency.

Environmental sustainability is a strategic principle in our National Lottery Strategy. We will ensure BFI funding decisions consider ecological impact and that we help recipients improve. Recognising the variety of beneficiaries, we will fund specialist expertise to develop ambitious and achievable plans for a net zero sector. We will also deliver robust carbon accounting of our progress. We will fund research that informs a green transition for the screen sectors, supporting approaches that deliver net benefit to the environment.

It is imperative that we also commit to a step change in how we work as an organisation. In 2023, we will set out a roadmap for reducing our absolute greenhouse gas emissions and establish the internal resource necessary to reach net zero ahead of the 2050 government deadline. This roadmap will help us determine how we embed sustainability into estate upgrades and operational planning. We will prioritise those areas of greatest impact, and find the most sustainable option for the future of the National Archive. As we transition to being a digital-first organisation, it will help us embed low-carbon practices throughout our decision- making.

We will also focus on sustainability during procurement, paying particular attention to our supply chain. We will not merely mitigate our impact but will also create positive change through biodiversity improvement across our estate. We will work with our neighbours on the South Bank, our friends in the environment and screen sectors, including the National Museum Directors’ Council and BAFTA albert. Sharing knowledge, best practice and new ways of working to minimise our carbon footprint and environmental impact.