BFI CEO Ben Roberts On Edinburgh Film Festival Closure & “Naive” Tweets: “We Don’t Have The Funds To Crisis Support Organizations” — London Film Festival
deadline.comThe 16th Film London Production Finance Market opened Tuesday morning with a keynote talk featuring BFI CEO Ben Roberts who spoke at length about his 10-year funding plan for British cinema and the financial issues hitting the industry, including the recent shuttering of the Edinburgh Film Festival. “Edinburgh is being seen as something of a canary in the coal mine in terms of the amount of rising costs and what impact that is having on the exhibition sector,” Roberts said when promoted about the situation.
Roberts was speaking on the day it emerged that the Scottish government was warned by Creative Scotland in September about Edinburgh’s financial difficulties but a bail-out using public money was ruled out.
Later during the keynote, Roberts continued to say that the BFI remains in contact with its exhibition partners. But he was firm in his conclusion that the BFI did not have the financial resources alone to rescue Edinburgh or other cultural organisations in similar need. “We don’t have the funds to crisis support organizations that are in difficulty.
We just don’t have enough resources. Edinburgh is further complicated by the fact that cultural exhibition is devolved in Scotland,” he said.
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