Making It On and Off Screen: Work, Inclusion and Diversity in UK Film

Who gets to ‘make it’ in the UK screen sector? How can creators, funders, businesses and cinemagoers encourage more diversity on and off our screens? – The CAMEo Research Institute invites you to an evening exploring diversity in the UK screen sector.

This free event – open to all – organised by the CAMEo Research Institute at the University of Leicester at Phoenix, will explore these issues.

The evening will include:

• The public launch of the BFI Workforce Diversity in the UK Screen Sector report and an update from the BFI on how it is working to support and increase diversity and inclusion
• A screening of The Acting Class (2017) – a documentary about class barriers in the acting industry
• A Q&A with the film’s directors Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne, a representative from the BFI and Birmingham-based actress Aimee Powell (BBC, Birmingham Repertory)

The Acting Class / 12A
Dir: Deirdre O’Neill & Mike Wayne
UK 2017, 1hr 13mins

This award winning documentary looks at how class barriers prevent working class talent from breaking in and staying in the acting industry.

The profession is increasingly dominated by a narrow social elite that is squeezing out opportunity and damaging innovation, and established actors worry about where the next generation of talent from modest backgrounds is going to come from.

Christopher Eccleston, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Maxine Peake and Samuel West are among those who feature in this film talking about the barriers to success. Rather than just an issue for those who see their dreams thwarted because they do not have the ‘bank of mom and dad’ to back them, who gets to be on our stages and screens matters to all of us. Whose stories get told, what images we have of ourselves, who we think ‘we’ are, helps shape our identities. And that is political.