Written evidence submitted by the Independent
Cinema Office (arts 223)
Our work is largely concerned with cultural
film and so our evidence will be confined to this area. We are
the national support organisation for independent film exhibition
which comprises film festivals, cinemas, arts centres, film societies
and community cinemas. Our main areas of activity are film programming
advice and booking; professional development training for staff;
promoting artists' moving image work in a cinema context; distribution
and consultancy.
Our main objective is to support the film exhibition
sector to ensure that culturally valuable film gets seen by the
widest audience possible.
We are a charity with a board of trustees, we
are not a membership organisation, our services can be accessed
by any organisation although the majority of our work is concerned
with the not for profit sector—trusts, charities, local
authority venues, voluntary groups and community organisations.
The venues we work with range from four screen artplexes such
as the Broadway in Nottingham and the Showroom in Sheffield to
community groups who screen films in village halls in rural locations.
We work across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and
we are also part of the European-wide Europa cinemas network.
There are 5.5 members of staff, we are funded
by the UK Film Council, Arts Council England, Skillset, the British
Film Institute and MEDIA. We generate about 40% of our funds from
our own activities.
We would like to see:
— A more streamlined and flexible approach
to lottery funding with one application process from one organisation
encompassing exhibition, archives, education, capital projects
and items and organisational development.
— A national film exhibition strategy with
robust priorities and clear ambitions about how best to achieve
cultural aims and a strong national cinema culture.
— A clear distinction made between the
commercial and cultural film sectors, with responsibility for
both been given to separate institutions or organisations so that
economic and cultural ambitions are not conflated.
— A much more informed and clear set of
priorities about what constitutes a healthy cultural cinema sector
which offers true diversity and choice for audiences in the 21st
century.
— Service provision and the distribution
of public funds should be housed in separate organisations.
1. Structural changes in arts funding, particularly
the abolition of the UK Film Council, should not mean that revenue
funding for cultural organisations should suffer. There should
be consultation with the sector about the best mechanism for delivering
public funding, which includes value for money, advice and support.
There should be a differentiation between funding bodies and service
providers. We do not believe it is possible to house both in one
organisation effectively.
2. We are already seeing an impact of spending
cuts from central and local government on provision of venues
across the UK with many having their grants cut from local authorities.
The most immediate impact of funding cuts is that the most interesting
work is dropped from programmes as well as ancillary activities
such as education and outreach programmes to local communities.
At the same time, as is characteristic in a creative sector, times
of recession ensure that businesses become more entrepreneurial
and conversely audiences often increase, as can be seen from domestic
revenues in the commercial cinema sector. This is a further demonstration
of the role that cultural cinema centres can play in developing
creative economies particularly in urban areas where there is
a synergy between production, distribution and exhibition.
3. One of the problems currently in this
sector is there is no national exhibition strategy and funding
has been spread across many different organisations including
regional screen agencies, Skillset, the UKFC and Arts Council,
England. This means that an organisation on the ground may have
to apply to a number of different organisations for funding for
the same project, whether lottery or treasury funding. Many of
these funds have different criteria, different deadlines and different
priorities. There is no shared strategic view of how best to support
cultural cinema across the UK.
4. For example within the theatre sector,
regional theatres are seen as flagship venues which require some
level of subsidy in order to present innovative and challenging
work which the market will not support. They often act as hubs
of activity for other theatres in the region with the national
institutions also offering benefits and support to smaller, less
well-funded organisations. Within the cultural cinema sector,
some regional venues are well supported, others are not. The changing
and differing priorities of regional screen agencies have ensured
that there is a piecemeal approach to supporting cultural cinema
whether it be through cinemas, archives or education programmes
which does not build a strong and sustainable sector.
5. Public subsidy for the arts can help
to encourage and seed fund enormous entrepreneurial activity—public
funding for venues in the UK on average constitutes around 1-5%
of turnover although there are notable exceptions to this. Public
subsidy therefore is necessary but should be seen as seed funding
to provide organisations with sound financial footing in order
to enable them to grow and prosper rather than as a replacement
for good business practice. This sector is under funded, generally
(outside the major institutions) has low salary rates and so therefore
is often deficient in business skills and experience. Cultural
organisations are businesses and need to be run professionally—when
they are not, funding organisations need to be much more pro-active
in identifying problems and intervening responsibly. There should
be much better training and recruitment for board members and
more professional training and support for senior managers.
6. There needs to be greater recognition
particularly in the film sector, that there is a difference between
the commercial industry and the cultural cinema sector. When responsibility
for these two areas are housed in the same organisation, it often
results in one being the poorer relation or certainly less well-served.
Other art forms do not seem to have the same problems in differentiating
between the commercial world and the cultural world—ie classical
music, theatre and often, creative synergies can grow from partnerships
between them.
7. National lottery funding for film does
not currently allow for organisations to bid for money for capital
items whether small (new cinema seats for a village hall) to large
(funding a feasibility study for a new build). It also does not
encompass capacity building for organisation ie seeking external
business advice and consultancy or establishing a company limited
by guarantee or charity. It is also contained currently in a number
of different agencies—nine regional screen agencies and
three national agencies. We would propose that lottery funding
for film is streamlined, housed in one place, made much simpler
and opened up to allow funds for capital items and capacity building.
This would ensure a much more strategic approach and help organisations
in the long-term as well as foster partnerships between exhibitors
across the UK.
8. There also needs to be a much more integrated
approach to the use of public funds wherein there is a distribution
and exhibition strategy for publicly funded films. This does not
necessarily mean following a commercial model—the cultural
cinema sector offers many examples of flexible and fruitful approaches
to distribution and exhibition but there needs to be a more formal
approach to adopting different models which ultimately will serve
audiences wherever they live.
9. There should be much greater parity between
funding for the different areas of production, distribution and
exhibition—in the past, production has always received a
lion's share of funding available but arguably, funding education
work, screening archive material, funding cultural cinemas, film
festivals and film societies has far greater impact on a wider
variety of audiences by ensuring that culturally important films
can be seen and engaged with, by the wider public.
September 2010
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