BFI apologises to film-maker over racial discrimination complaint

The chief executive of the British Film Institute has apologised to a prominent film-maker of colour for mishandling his complaint about racial discrimination.

The apology from Ben Roberts comes after an independent report found that the BFI had “badly handled” a complaint by Faisal Qureshi, the producer behind hit UK film Four Lions, and that it was “understandable that [he] feels deeply dissatisfied”.

Qureshi had complained to the BFI that he was given incorrect information about accessing National Lottery funding and inappropriately discouraged from bidding for it, and that his subsequent complaint was handled inappropriately.

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The BFI commissioned an independent report from Verita, the complaints reviewer for National Lottery-funded organisations. The report concluded there was not enough evidence to draw conclusions on Qureshi’s view that there was “systemic racism within the BFI”, but it said the organisation’s response to the complaint “fell well short of constituting a formal response”.

“At the heart of the complaint is an allegation that someone working as part of a programme funded and overseen by the BFI behaved inappropriately,” the report said. “The fact that the BFI has never attempted to address this central allegation suggests that it was assumed that the allegation was wrong.”

Roberts said: “The report clearly indicates that our handling of your complaint fell well short of both your expectations and ours, and we let you down. I would like to reassure you that we take the findings of the Verita report seriously.”

He said that the BFI had made several improvements to its complaints procedure, including meetings and phone calls with complainants and stronger training for team members.

He added that he appreciated that Qureshi remains “dissatisfied with the BFI’s support for filmmakers and particularly filmmakers from the global majority”, and offered to meet to discuss a way forward.

Qureshi said it was “helpful” to get an apology, though it’s “not for what I wanted”. He has not yet decided whether to meet with Roberts.

He said: “There is only so many times organisations can say they have learned from their mistakes, usually by inflicting trauma on ethnic minorities. That it took five years to get this far only for them to go ‘trust us again’ is not a reasonable reassurance. Maybe a more significant one is change in their leadership.”

The BFI said: “We have carefully considered Verita’s report, which concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to find that the complainant was discriminated against on racial grounds.

“We accept that our handling of the complaint was not good enough. We have apologised to Faisal and invited him to meet with BFI chief executive Ben Roberts.

“We’ve overhauled our complaints process and handling of complex cases. We care deeply about being an anti-racist organisation. We’ve introduced mandatory inclusion training for all BFI employees, and over 100 senior leaders have participated in an intensive inclusivity programme.

“We are focused on equality of access to our funds. In 2023-24, 38% of feature development funding and 28% of production funding supported black and global majority talent.”