Despite
the critical and commercial success of “Dear White people” both in the U.S and
at the Sundance Festival, a film by a
first time director Justine Simien, one would imagine that distributors would
be knocking on the director’s door to get it out to the public. However in the UK,
the film will not be shown in cinemas but will instead be going straight to DVD
and Netflix. The reason being that the film failed to get the support from the
BFI to get it distributed, not to the Multiplex cinemas but to the independent cinemas.
Ben Robertson, a spokesperson for the BFI gave some rational reasons as to why
it would not support it including such factors as; audience development in the
UK, core audience being black and not getting the bookings from the Multiplex
cinemas etc. None of these rational reasons when challenged hold up. What
really appears to be the case is that, currently the BFI has very little
experience of dealing with black distributors so perhaps they don’t know what
they don’t know. Secondly, in all probability, it is likely that the processes
and criteria’s BFI use to make their decisions has unintended systemic bias,
the impact of which leads to exclusion of films which otherwise would be worthy
of their support. Perhaps the decision makers at the BFI need to think about
how they are applying the funding which they receive from the lottery money and
become aware of where there might be unconscious bias despite their best intentions.
