Breaking news: BFI to get more money

In an impressive public relations move, the British Film Institute (BFI) will tonight use the opening of the 51st London Film Festival to announce a much-needed grant from government to restore the country's National Film and Television Archive (NFTA).

BFI chairman Anthony Minghella is expected to make the announcement of a one-off £25-million grant to a full-house in the Odeon Leicester Square before a screening of David Cronenberg's 'Eastern Promises' tonight.

As reported in a Time Out investigation in August of this year into the workings of the Institute, the BFI, which manages the archive, has long been seeking a grant of £34 milllion to carry out essential work at the site of the archive in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The new figure of £25 million will be very welcome within the BFI and the film community. The grant, which has been the subject of much debate inside and outside the BFI for many months now, comes in the wake of last week's Comprehensive Spending Review, which saw an increase in funding to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) that will take its annual budget to £2.2 billion in three year's time.

The archive, which occupies the site of an old farm, is the home of 50,000 fiction features, 100,000 non-fiction works and 625,000 TV programmes and serves as the official deposit for the film and television industries in much the same way that the British Library serves the world of publishing.

In 2003, the archive was in such a state of disrepair that the National Audit Office condemned the BFI for leaving films to rot on its shelves.

It was the archive that restored the Mitchell and Kenyon films of Edwardian life so that they could play to more than 4 million BBC viewers in 2005. The BFI has struggled to argue for the cause of the archive, even if James Purnell, Secretary of State for the DCMS told parliament in August that 'the BFI archive is a national treasure. It is arguably the finest film and television archive anywhere in the world… It is safe in our hands.'

‘Film is not a Rembrandt,’ Andrea Kalas, senior preservation manager at the archive told TIme Out in August during a visit to the Hertfordshire site.

‘It’s not the Magna Carta. It doesn’t have that cultural gravitas for most people. But when I look at a Mitchell and Kenyon negative, or the original of the first time Charlie Chaplin ever appeared on a film, I feel that way. And I think other people do too, when they understand how precious – and how temporary – it can be.’

Purnell today told Time Out: 'We will announce tomorrow that we will safeguard the archive and we've found £25m as part of our Comprehensive Spending Review settlement to make sure that can happen. We're doing that because the BFI archive is one of the great British cultural jewels and we want to make sure that it's not just preserved but that it's a fantastic resource in terms of access and storytelling and something that can be very alive.'

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