Transcript

BEN ROBERTS

What sometimes gets lost from the BFI's story is that we look after the largest film and television archive in the world. And that goes back 80 or more years, huge collection of films which are not just films and TV, which are not just British, but from around the world.

We re-present a lot of that work at the BFI Southbank, which is the national cinema tech on the Southbank in London. We run a film festival in London in the autumn. We run a lesbian and gay film festival in the spring. The broadest possible role of the BFI is to just make sure that the value of film, both its cultural value, what it says about us as people. What film is, is a record of life and moments in history, politics perhaps- is actually really interesting for all of us. When I came to the BFI, I was placed on the fifth floor in our building here in London, opposite the archive team.

So we sat next to each other, which reminded you every day that what you're doing in terms of contemporary film development and production, and developing new talent, was at some point going to need to sit alongside and justify itself in an archive, and continue to tell that story of culture and Britain through film.