Is the fate of UK film being deter­mined by an algorithm?

Inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma is one of the UK’s largest exports. It con­tributed £11bn to the econ­o­my the year before the pan­dem­ic; more than agri­cul­ture. But cul­tur­al elit­ism, and a gov­ern­ment algo­rithm, could spell dis­as­ter for an indus­try brought to a stand­still by suc­ces­sive lock­downs and insuf­fi­cient funding.

Ear­ly on in the pan­dem­ic, the BFI esti­mat­ed that 95 per cent of inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas could per­ma­nent­ly close. After six months of tire­less cam­paign­ing by cin­e­ma work­ers, the Chan­cel­lor announced a £1.5 bil­lion fund­ing pack­age for cul­ture and her­itage, the Cul­ture Recov­ery Fund (CRF). But for some, it was already too late. ​“By the time the fund­ing was announced,” says Jason Wood, Cre­ative Direc­tor of Film and Cul­ture at HOME in Man­ches­ter, who have now received their fund­ing, ​“many busi­ness­es had already gone to the wall.”

MPs also feared that the lack of sup­port for free­lancers and indi­vid­u­als in the indus­try might force them to food banks. As we pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed, many of those work­ing in the UK film indus­try are free­lancers, jug­gling mul­ti­ple jobs in order to sus­tain their main inter­est. Yet the government’s self-employ­ment sup­port scheme only cov­ers work that pro­vides 50 per cent or more of a person’s income, and so many peo­ple in the indus­try have been left out in the cold.

“They’ve got to invest in the grass­roots indus­try,” says Sam Neo­phy­tou, who runs Art­House cin­e­ma in Crouch End, North Lon­don. For him, inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas ​“aren’t just venues”. His staff are more impor­tant – they’re key to the indus­try going for­ward. ​“We’ve got actors, direc­tors, film­mak­ers,” he says, who are work­ing front of house at Art­House. ​“They are our future.”

Pro­tect­ing the liveli­hoods of cin­e­ma work­ers is cru­cial to safe­guard­ing the UK film indus­try as a whole. What lit­tle mon­ey is pro­vid­ed for inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas, to cov­er the costs of Covid adjust­ments and loss of income, has still left venues scrap­ing the bar­rel of their resources. Paul Vick­ery, Head of Pro­gram­ming at the Prince Charles Cin­e­ma in Cen­tral Lon­don, tells us that the own­er of the cin­e­ma was ​“top­ping up” the pay of staff from 80 per cent pro­vid­ed by fur­lough, to the full amount, ​“from his own pocket”.

How­ev­er, ​“If you let these places use their resources and slow­ly cut away the staff, what you return to won’t be what was there before,” Vick­ery says. ​“It’s like try­ing to rebuild a city after a war. Rebuild­ing from the rub­ble. But if we had sup­port, we could come back bet­ter than before.”

But per­sis­tent delays have meant that, a year into the pan­dem­ic, only half of the CRF has been dis­trib­uted. And what has been dis­trib­uted sug­gests what Wood describes as ​“cul­tur­al elit­ism in this government”.

Fund­ing for the Arts is already shock­ing­ly low – at the time of writ­ing it stands at just 0.5 per cent of the government’s total Covid spend­ing. The divi­sion of that mon­ey also rais­es con­cerns. The CRF is being over­seen by a board of indi­vid­u­als invit­ed to their roles, includ­ing Elis­a­beth Mur­doch, Baroness Cather­ine Fall and Claire Whitak­er, with no input from local councils.

The Nation­al Audit Office (NAO) has con­firmed that ​“min­is­ters, the Depart­ment and HM Trea­sury” decid­ed the cri­te­ria for who would be award­ed fund­ing. This was defined as organ­i­sa­tions that, pre-Covid, were ​“finan­cial­ly viable”, ​“cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant”, ​“essen­tial to the fab­ric of a place” or were key in the government’s ​“lev­el­ling up agenda”.

“The film indus­try con­tributes huge­ly to the UK econ­o­my, and yet they treat it like a lux­u­ry,” says Wood. ​“They place a very high val­ue on bal­let and the opera, which are ter­rif­ic, but they need to place more val­ue on work­ing class art forms, like cinema.”

We have learned that the BFI was giv­en £44m to par­cel out to approx­i­mate­ly 800 inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas reg­is­tered in the UK, just shy of three per cent of the total CRF. The rest of the fund­ing was hand­ed over to Arts Coun­cil Eng­land (ACE), the Nation­al Lot­tery Her­itage Fund and His­toric England.

In our inves­ti­ga­tion into the CRF, we’ve found that sev­en opera hous­es and one tour­ing opera com­pa­ny were award­ed a total of £4.4m by ACE. This is equiv­a­lent to 10 times the amount of fund­ing per insti­tu­tion than inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas. Else­where, 42 inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas have shared £650,000 of grant mon­ey, while Secret Group, the mul­ti-mil­lion pound pri­vate equi­ty firm behind Secret Cin­e­ma, was award­ed almost £1m.

Addi­tion­al­ly, almost half of the CRF has been assigned to her­itage, includ­ing refur­bish­ments to church­es and dis­used pris­ons, as well as the sets for Down­ton Abbey and the Har­ry Pot­ter films. Which is great news, until you remem­ber that none of the fund­ing has gone to the peo­ple actu­al­ly mak­ing film or television.

The media has been inun­dat­ed with pos­i­tive feed­back about the CRF, main­ly due to the stip­u­la­tion that those award­ed are legal­ly oblig­at­ed to send out a press release under the ban­ner #Here­for­Cul­ture. What the indus­try real­ly thinks is anoth­er matter.

“What­ev­er boots you need to kiss to get the mon­ey,” as Neo­phy­tou puts it. ​“That isn’t going to stop us being who we are. We’re inde­pen­dent, and we’re always going to be that.”

The loss of inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas, and many oth­er insti­tu­tions across the UK which employ cre­atives, could be cat­a­stroph­ic for the indus­try: the next gen­er­a­tion of Andrea Arnolds and Edgar Wrights may well be work­ing front of house sell­ing tick­ets and serv­ing pop­corn, and could be denied the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take their first prop­er steps into film and television.

But what is cul­ture, any­way, and who gets to define it? At present, it’s those con­trol­ling the mon­ey – with the help of a com­put­er algorithm.

We have found that ​‘Spot­light’, an ​“auto­mat­ed due dili­gence tool” designed by Michael Gove’s Cab­i­net Office, was used to process thou­sands of grant appli­ca­tions of up to £3m. It seems to have exclud­ed insti­tu­tions val­ued by local com­mu­ni­ties in favour of those that fit the algorithm.

When reached out to for com­ment, the Cab­i­net Office declined to pro­vide spe­cif­ic details, respond­ing that they ​“do not put civ­il ser­vants for­ward for inter­views”. They told us that Spot­light was in beta test­ing before being rolled out ​“from March 2020”, and that ​“the tool com­ple­ments exist­ing checks and high­lights areas of risk to inform grant-mak­ing deci­sions and risks that may require fur­ther investigation”.

The use of this tool brings into ques­tion who is decid­ing what ​“cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant organ­i­sa­tions” are, and how that is being mea­sured. For exam­ple, The Wind­mill in Brix­ton was reject­ed on the grounds that it was reg­is­tered as a sole trad­er. On the oth­er hand, Sundis­sential Ltd was a dor­mant com­pa­ny until it filed com­pa­ny accounts three days before the grant appli­ca­tion dead­line, and was award­ed £223,822. ACE are inves­ti­gat­ing the case, while a fur­ther 44 inci­dents of fraud were report­ed as of Jan­u­ary 2021. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Audit Office, five awards have since been withdrawn.

We have also found com­pa­nies award­ed fund­ing that would appear to mud­dy the def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘cul­ture’. This includes dozens of pubs and restau­rants which host events. Cubana, a tapas bar and restau­rant, hosts live music for din­ers and was award­ed £119,000. This inves­ti­ga­tion has iden­ti­fied eight oth­er pubs oper­at­ing in the same vein that have been award­ed close to £1.5m between them.

In addi­tion, more than 60 events com­pa­nies have received fund­ing totalling £13m. Two cor­po­rate events com­pa­nies, TH Col­lec­tive and The Event Umbrel­la Ltd, also won fund­ing. By con­trast, the MAP (Music and Arts Pro­duc­tion) char­i­ty in Leeds was award­ed the min­i­mum £50,000. The char­i­ty offers BTEC qual­i­fi­ca­tions for chil­dren aged 11 – 16 who are unable to access main­stream school. Devas, a char­i­ty formed in 1884 pro­vid­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to young peo­ple in the arts, was also award­ed £50,000.

None of this implies improp­er or ille­gal activ­i­ty on the parts of those who won fund­ing. What it does high­light is that the cri­te­ria by which fund­ing was sup­posed to be award­ed seems to have been large­ly ignored. It is unre­al­is­tic to expect an algo­rithm to fair­ly define what is ​“cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant” or intrin­sic to the ​“fab­ric of a place”.

It’s impor­tant to note that the BFI did not use Spot­light. (Wood says that the BFI have been ​“bril­liant through­out this process.”) Appli­cants were giv­en a 12-week win­dow in which to apply – sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than the two weeks assigned to oth­er parts of the CRF – and the BFI then man­u­al­ly went through every appli­ca­tion, even help­ing indi­vid­ual cin­e­mas with their applications.

A spokesper­son for the BFI told us that 77 per cent of the cin­e­mas that applied received some fund­ing, and 83 per cent of grant mon­ey went to cin­e­mas out­side of Lon­don. How­ev­er, only £21m has so far been released, and none of it has gone to indi­vid­u­als or freelancers.

The BFI fur­ther com­ment­ed: ​“The enor­mi­ty of the sit­u­a­tion for film and TV free­lance work­ers came into focus quick­ly ear­ly last year which is why we set up the Covid-19 Emer­gency Fund for Film & TV with Film & TV Char­i­ty… how to bet­ter deal with it for the work­force is very much a live issue for us.”

Accord­ing to them, the last quar­ter of 2020 saw an increase in indie pro­duc­tions with the help of the Film & TV Pro­duc­tion Restart Scheme, with £0.5m pro­vid­ed by the gov­ern­ment to cov­er insur­ance costs.

The future of cin­e­ma in the UK requires increased sup­port in all regards. At the begin­ning of this year, promi­nent fig­ures in the indus­try such as Steve McQueen and Christo­pher Nolan signed an open let­ter ask­ing the gov­ern­ment for more finan­cial sup­port for larg­er cin­e­ma chains that are respon­si­ble for 80 per cent of UK audi­ences and had missed out on funding.

While the UK cin­e­ma indus­try is a large ecosys­tem, ulti­mate­ly it is the peo­ple who cre­ate, pro­duce, dis­trib­ute and exhib­it the films we love that make the indus­try what it is. It is also indi­vid­u­als who are at the root of his­toric and per­sis­tent cul­tur­al elit­ism. In the next arti­cle in this series, we will take a foren­sic look at the peo­ple respon­si­ble for the dis­tri­b­u­tion of gov­ern­ment fund­ing, and those stand­ing to prof­it the most.