"[4] But this changed through the emergence of the Free Cinema movement, which included a number of young filmmakers - Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Walter Lassally who were prominent contributors to the BFI's magazine Sight & Sound.
Under Hassan and Relph, the Board produced two further films by Douglas, My Ain Folk (1974) and My Way Home (1978), as well as features such as Winstanley, by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, Horace Ové's Pressure (1976) [8]- the first black feature film produced in the UK, A Private Enterprise (1974) by Peter K. Smith (the first Asian feature film produced in Britain), but it also provided funding for the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and experimental filmmakers such as Stephen Dwoskin, William Raban, Peter Gidal and Gill Etherley.
[9] After Gavin's resignation and the appointment of Peter Sainsbury as Head of Production, the Board faced a number of crises: the first concerned Sainsbury's call of a set of explicit selection criteria, which "were frequently the subject of fierce controversy among independent filmmakers";[10] the second concerned censorship, after the BFI caved to police demands not to screen Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill's documentary Juvenile Liaison (1975), the first full-length documentary funded by the Board; the third concerned the lack of distribution for the Board's films, including Pressure, due to economic constraints.
Sainsbury made improving this a priority, and "between 1977 and 1979, a dozen new BFI films has a London theatrical release… six of them being bought by the BBC for television transmission".
[11] Budgets remained low, and in 1979, "the Production Board [had] to strike an agreement with the ACTT (the film technicians' union) to allow crews to be paid below agreed minimum rates in exchange for a share in the profits".
[1] Chris Petit's debut film Radio On (1979), Peter Greenaway's A Walk Through H (1978), the Quay Brothers' Nocturna Artificialia (1979), Sue Clayton's The Song of the Shirt (1979), Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (1979), and Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981) represented the diversity and innovation of Sainsbury's commissioning: they included and challenged both fiction and documentary, and combined social politics with experimental aesthetics.
The New Directors scheme, initiated in 1986, led to funding for a remarkable range of films, including Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But... (1989), Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (1991), and Margaret Tait's Blue Black Permanent (1992).
The Board also produced features such as Sixth Happiness (Waris Hussein, 1997), Under the Skin (Carine Adler, 1997), Speak Like A Child (John Akomfrah, 1998), and Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People (1999), which won Best Film in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.