If you work in film (or are at least film adjacent) you’ll be well aware that the start of a new year always brings with it the excited organised chaos of awards season as campaigns are launched, screeners shared and films jostle shoulders for favourites status. Regulars here at Directors Notes will know that we too enter into the spirit of the season albeit from a much more measured position by taking our audience inside the creation of the films in the running for the year’s top awards through our director interviews. However, with this year’s British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, or more familiarly, the BAFTAs due to reveal its 2025 list of nominations tomorrow – soon to be followed by the final round of voting for the films which will be celebrated at the awards ceremony on Sunday 16th February – I took the opportunity to tick off an interview that’s long been on my and DN’s wish list by inviting BAFTA Film Committee Chair Anna Higgs to our pages for a discussion in which we get into how she broke into the film industry, BAFTA’s wide ranging and practical role as a champion of British filmmaking and the mechanics of the BAFTA Awards from eligibility through to voting. Anna’s is a career I’ve followed (enviously) for years, be that her award-winning Producer roles, the innovative multi-platform work she did during her time as Commission Editor & Head of Digital at Film4 or the defining of NOWNESS’ identity and 50/50 gender-balanced commissioning when she was Creative Director over there, all of which we discuss in detail in the unabridged video interview that you can watch at the end of this piece.

As someone who comes from a working class background in Birmingham without the contacts that you’d presume from someone who’s had your career, how did you make your way into the film industry and forge the impressive path that you have?

I grew up in Birmingham between a long term unemployed dad in social housing and my mum who was from an Irish immigrant family and had no connections in film or TV. My mum managed to get into tertiary education by training as a teacher and then found her own way into working in community arts and empowering people to tell their own stories which was probably a big inspiration to me. I knew that’s where I wanted to be but had no idea how to do it. Basically I thought, if I want to be creative I’ve got to understand the commercial world more because I’m not ever going to have a trust fund or a house in Notting Hill to live with mum and dad while I intern for free so I need to really understand the world of business and finance. I managed to get onto a graduate recruitment scheme and treated that like a paid MBA but at the same time I was doing little bits on the side and I was on the Shooting People website finding stuff out.

The rooms that I have been in are rooms that someone with my background aren’t usually in.

A friend of a friend of a friend of one of my mum’s colleagues who did work in film, put me in touch with the now legendary Dame Pippa Harris of Neal Street Productions. She very kindly let me go and have a cup of tea with her and I asked her a bunch of very stupid questions. I said, “Listen I can’t start working for free again, I can’t repeat my career. How do I find my way in but get a job or do something that can cover my costs of living in London?” because that’s pretty much where you had to be at that point. She said, try and get into the National Film and Television School, it’s basically the old boys’ network of film and television for good and for ill. If you can afford the time to do that you’ll come out with a level of network, a cohort and the kind of connections to then embed yourself and get a job in development, broadcast or something like that. And that’s basically what I did, although it wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

The rooms that I have been in are rooms that someone with my background aren’t usually in. I’ve quite often in my jobs been surrounded by only people who have been to Oxford or Cambridge, or only people who have an established background or people from those worlds. They’re incredible people to learn from and to be around, but it can be quite isolating when you’ve clambered your way in there and your hands are quite tired from clawing your way up that slippery wall.

Do you feel the way in for someone from a similar background to you would be more or less difficult to achieve nowadays?

In a funny way, I think it’s both. There are some quite scary stats that from a general social mobility perspective in the UK it’s much harder now to make it from a council estate through to university or into any kind of arts career than it was 30 years ago when it was me or even from the 60s. The gap is much bigger because of things like grants from your local authority to go to university being cut and all of the infrastructure that has eroded. But, at the same time, technology has changed the environment around us so people can make stuff where they are. Your phone is a movie camera these days. Anthony Dod Mantle’s just shot the latest Danny Boyle film on an iPhone. There’s probably quite a lot of amazing stuff around that and kit to go with it knowing Anthony but, nonetheless, people are making incredible stuff and there are scores of filmmakers who have just gone out there, done it and then used that as their way in and there are programmes that recognise that. BAFTA itself has had a year of focus on social mobility because that is the central, almost galvanising force between any intersectional challenges, whether it be race, gender or others. Generally, what your socioeconomic status is defines the route through that.

How did you come to join BAFTA and subsequently become Chair of the Film Committee?

This is also a good example of perseverance as I applied for membership to BAFTA three times and I only got in the third time. I also stood for election to the Film Committee three times and only got on the third time. I was maybe on the committee for a year when the then chair, Marc Samuelson said “I think you should stand to be my deputy.” He was the chair of the committee at the time and the biggest lie I’ve ever been told, I always say, was that he said, “It’s not that much more work”. It definitely, definitely was because it’s all voluntary. A lot of people think I’m paid by BAFTA and that it’s my full time job. It is quite full time, but it is unpaid. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s my ‘doing good for the world’ stuff, as well as learning a huge amount.

I think I was elected Deputy Chair in 2018. I did that for a couple of years and I am now in my fourth year as Chair of the Film Committee. When you’re the chair of one of the committees you also sit on the Board of Trustees so that all the sectors are represented on the overall BAFTA board. I’ve been doing that for the last four or five years and worked with the then Chair Krishnendu Majumdar through the BAFTA 2020 Review and it’s been a real privilege to do what you can to make the industry a bit more accessible, representative and as the BAFTA mantra goes, “To level the playing field”. I want it to be less hard for people like me or you or all sorts of other filmmakers I’ve connected with through this to get in and to share their excellence with everyone.

I had presumed that BAFTA was government funded but you’re actually an arts charity. What is it that the organisation does to support and nurture the UK film industry?

It’s a tiny arts charity! The number of people behind the scenes is like The Wizard of Oz – it looks all glitzy and amazing but you pull the curtain back and it’s like a couple of people with some cogs. BAFTA receives no core year-on-year public funding whatsoever. It’s done a couple of projects with people like the BFI, which have involved public funding but predominantly the funding comes from its membership fees, fundraising and the revenue that the awards bring in through sponsorships. It’s huge amounts of work to keep that running in order to fund all of the programmes of work. BAFTA looks like three very glitzy award ceremonies in terms of Film, TV and Games, and then there are the Scotland and Cymru awards, but actually behind the scenes is that year-round arts charity doing learning, inclusion and talent work, to “celebrate, support and inspire” which is the mission statement for people in those three sectors.

The academicians who are at the top of their games are so important to adding the weight to what BAFTA does.

I think it is amazing that it has that ability to raise its own funds and do its own work. The way that it’s structured around a membership academy is actually the more powerful thing because BAFTA is only as good as its academicians. I believe in that academy in the sense of it being about excellence in our sectors, our creative world, and preserving and challenging the norms for excellence for future generations. How are we sharing our intelligence? How am I sharing what I know so that I can help other people not make the same mistakes? The academicians (Games, TV and Film practitioners, and sometimes hybrid across those sectors) who are at the top of their games are so important to adding the weight to what BAFTA does. Each sector committee helps inform BAFTA’s learning and talent programmes with our expertise, such as: We need to be looking at the state of freelancers at the moment or we need to be thinking about disability representation, can we pull a cross-sector advisory group together? There are all sorts of things that sound a bit bureaucratic but are really informed by what’s going on on the ground, what our academicians and members are telling us, what we’re learning from the new talent programmes and what that new talent is telling us that they need. It’s iterative. We’re always listening, we’re always developing. But really, it’s about championing and supporting that next generation, whatever stage of the journey and in fact celebrating people who are at the top of their game because that then inspires people just starting out.

Programmes like Elevate and Breakthrough to the flagship learning programmes are really important for people who are more in that mid-stage of their careers. There are loads of things to support your first short or your first feature – although it’s still not straightforward and easy – but when you’re mid-career how do you go from producing small dramas to big high-end TV? How can you elevate yourself? Those programmes have been designed to tackle exactly those problems that we’ve heard from members in the industry.

How do the different BAFTA membership levels feed into each other and support people across their careers?

The main BAFTA membership is that you’re a full voting member of whichever sector that you are from and you need to have five years experience at a Head of Department level. We’ve looked at, what are the criteria that show that you are operating with excellence because you’re going to get to vote on what you consider to be excellent in all of your sector work and the awards so that’s really important. There are also nations and regions members so we have BAFTA North America where there are international members who do a lot of work with the UK or are experts in their field and add to the richness of our academic and our academician knowledge base. Same for Scotland and Wales, they’re working in those regions and territories and so have that excellence and expertise there.

The newest tier of membership is the BAFTA Connect membership. That is looking at people who don’t meet the five year standard yet but are well on their way to and so we can connect them into the experiences, learning and opportunities that will help them get there. That’s an application process which will be opening up again later in 2025. It’s proved very popular, we get thousands of applications for a couple hundred places. You do that for a limited time period. Hopefully, at the end of that period, you might then apply for full membership or you might be well on your way to the kind of experiences that in a couple of years you can then come back and apply. People might not quite reach the benchmark, but you can keep applying and maybe get in the next year.

If your work is excellent, it doesn’t matter who you know.

That’s a big change from when I first applied. For example, you had to have two people nominate you to be part of BAFTA and they had to be BAFTA members so it was very much who you knew. I was lucky I’d been to the NFTS, which was part of the old boys’ network that I’d accessed. Nik Powell was one of mine and I think a tutor from the course was also a member and supported me. It didn’t help me the first two times but did the third. Now we’ve completely removed that because if your work is excellent, it doesn’t matter who you know. And your work might not be in the most traditional linear space, you might have been working on loads of branded storytelling or doing incredible games work in a different way in an independent studio so you haven’t got those big PlayStation studio titles on your list. The academicians that advise the membership team can look at it and go, “This is a tiny indie studio but it’s excellent, we should definitely include them” because that gives us a wider breadth of member.

And so onto the BAFTA Film Awards. What are the eligibility routes for consideration, especially for the shorts and debut feature filmmakers?

That is hopefully very simple. There’s a very clear qualifying festivals list that you can be part of and if your short has played at two or more of those festivals you can submit it. Those show you’ve got enough momentum behind the film that you’re kind of on your way. As you can imagine, there are thousands of festivals and thousands and thousands of shorts made so we’ve got to have some way of establishing an excellence bar. That qualifying festivals list is looked at every single year by people who run short film festivals, who are filmmakers, who do that work and are amazing curators so that we’ve got the best, most up to date list that is relevant and is going to be as inclusive as possible. So we’re always adding to that list and making sure those festivals are still operating at the top of their game curatorially.

Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer is another thing we updated as part of the awards review. It used to be that you had to have a limited release – the number of cinema screenings was smaller because often first features get a much smaller cinema release. That landscape’s extremely challenged at the moment so we added in that you could play at a certain number of festivals as well. You don’t have to have a cinema release as long as you meet all the other criteria – that it was your first film, that you’re British-based or British qualifying and various point systems attached to that, a bit like the cultural test. But you can play at a festival so that we’re as inclusive as possible. People can just submit: Distributors, sales agents or the filmmakers themselves once they hit that threshold.

We always err on the side of inclusivity. How are we missing anything? Who don’t we know? Who should we know? Who will tell us who we don’t know? Expanding that reach.

We also have quite a brilliant set of longlisting people from the membership who sit on the Shorts and the Debut Juries. The Debut Jury works year-round. They’re watching stuff at festivals and they say, “Actually, this is probably eligible” and the film team at BAFTA check that out. They make sure it’s eligible and they invite people to submit as well who might not have realised they could be eligible. So again, we always err on the side of inclusivity. How are we missing anything? Who don’t we know? Who should we know? Who will tell us who we don’t know? Expanding that reach. Hopefully, that’s been reflected in the kind of longlists and shortlists of who we’ve had in those categories year-on-year and it’s really exciting. The Debut Jury watch so many films! The awards this year are on the 16th of February, that jury will start watching new stuff from the 17th or 18th. It’s a non-stop thing because there are so many films that are eligible in contention.

How does BAFTA’s voting process work and does it change as it progresses along the various phases from longlist to nomination?

Yes, it does. It can be quite complicated, but ours is fairly simple compared to other academies having looked at all the different ways it’s done. For Debut, that’s a jury consciously put together to make sure there’s a representative set of people from all sorts of disciplines, backgrounds and perspectives. They get all of the stuff in, watch it all, debate and discuss, and refine those down to a shortlist, to nominations, and then they also have a jury meeting to select that winner. That’s one of the only pure juried awards because Debut is so rich and varied in terms of the types of films you’ve got in that mix. Shorts is a combination of jury and if you’re a member you can opt in. You can say, I want to watch shorts I’d like to watch them at longlisting stage so I’ll watch 100 for you and then I’d like to be part of the shorts voting when they get down to a shorter list. So there’s a chunk of people that watch lots and then there’s a chunk of people that watch the shortened down version, and some people do both of those. Then once we get to the five nominees in the Short Film and Short Animation (five nominees in each), if you’re opted into that chapter, you get to vote. Because I chair a bunch of juries, I sadly don’t get to watch the longlisted version of all the shorts but I do opt into the shorts vote so I will watch the shorts in the longlisting stage, and I will then vote to decide the nominees and then decide the winner.

For the other stuff, it’s your chapter. So if you’re an actor, in the round one, you vote on the actors from all of the eligible films. 235, I think is the number of eligible films in contention this year. Because you’re an actor, you are judging your peers, you can debate and discuss what is excellent. You watch your unconscious bias videos that we have on the BAFTA View Portal, and then you vote which creates the longlist. That then goes back to a chapter vote for the nominations and then the entire membership votes on the winners for things like Best Film, Actor, and a few of the other craft chapters. But predominantly in round one, if not in round two as well, it’s a chapter-only vote because you seek the expertise where it is from, as in cinematographers voting on cinematography, editors voting on editing, so on and so forth.

There’s also some minimal jury intervention. We have a longlist intervention for the Acting performance categories. So the top seven voted acting performances automatically go through and the longlisting jury, which I chair, takes the next eight to fifteen of the top-voted actors, we debate and discuss three of those to make the last three in that ten longlist. It’s never revealed who’s who because they’re still top-voted. It’s done very equitably and fairly, but it’s about levelling the playing field. It might be things that people haven’t seen so much or have got less of a marketing campaign for award season, much more independent stuff, etc. so it’s levelling out all of those things based on a lot of research. Then that goes back to that chapter for them to vote. The same is true in a couple of the awards like that.

Interestingly you diversify a pool as well by things like genre, not just by the gender of the director or the kind of underrepresented group that’s in the onscreen storytelling.

A big change we made that’s exciting is we introduced viewing groups. If you’re a BAFTA member, you might be in the cinematography chapter so you’ll be watching stuff based on knowing those are things that might be in contention, you want to take a look at and want root for because you saw it in the cinema early in the year. But you will also get a list of 15 films which are selected randomly, essentially from right across those 235 eligible films. You’ll get blockbusters, indie movies, films not in the English language, probably a documentary – a whole range of stuff. The idea is if you watch all of those diligently – and our research shows that most academicians do – what we’re doing is getting people to watch stuff that is outside of the usual awards campaign of who are the front runners. By doing that we’re levelling the playing field and starting to see more films come into contention that maybe didn’t have the biggest marketing budget or the biggest awards campaign. We’re starting to see things like a documentary make it into a best film list or an animated film or a family film come through. Interestingly you diversify a pool as well by things like genre, not just by the gender of the director or the kind of underrepresented group that’s in the onscreen storytelling. That’s a big passion point of mine because I think we do have a social bias as to who and what type of film is awards worthy.

Something we’ve seen increasing around awards season here at DN are For Your Consideration campaigns for short films and people bringing PR teams on board. Do those kinds of campaigns skew the playing field and what should filmmakers who don’t have the funds for that do?

I think it can. And that’s why we have some quite strict rules about what you are and aren’t allowed to do from a campaigning perspective. If you download the rulebook from the BAFTA website, you can entertain yourself for hours learning about how many emails people are allowed to send a week. There’s a strict limit on entertainment at those screenings, you can’t give people champagne and lobster for example. There are quite strict rules around advertising or if a super famous person is going to host it, etc. So there are a bunch of things like that, that try to level the playing field as much as you can. But there will be short filmmakers that can’t do any of that, such as hiring a screening room in London which is really expensive. From that perspective, I would say embrace those challenges and try and do what feels authentic to you. Do an online screening, do an Instagram live about what you’re doing.

You don’t have to have a PR company. If you’re a filmmaker who can’t afford one, but you have a short that you want to get to those shorts voters, you can talk to BAFTA, get a list of voters you send out your own email to saying, “We’re going to do a live stream at this point with a Q&A about our film”. So you could do it in exactly the same way that a massive studio or streamer does and actually, there’s something authentic and interesting in that. You might also find that you’ve had a mentor or been lucky enough to meet a filmmaker who might want to support you in that and agree to do a Q&A with you. I know there are a bunch of directors and writers who are doing that at the moment, which is inspiring because it is how you start. The feature film Femme a couple of years ago was from a short that got nominated for a BAFTA. That sparked attention and shows you that the talent pipeline really does work. I talk a lot about this idea of the ‘award spotlight’. That spotlight throws a beautiful sparkle on all of those debut categories and shorts categories. Just the nomination can mean: Okay, this filmmaker is in the top X per cent of talent because they’re getting recognized in this way. Let’s talk to them about where they want to go with this, what they want to do next. You can fund your features and next project off just an awards nomination. You don’t have to have it (great commissioners and funders will spot talent regardless) but I would just get creative around those challenges. If you can’t do your own big campaign, do an element of DIY. There are brilliant filmmakers like Jeanie Finlay who is the queen of DIY. I would recommend going back and watching every talk she’s ever done about how she engages with audience and finds communities around that stuff because she’s a master at it.

You can talk to BAFTA, get a list of voters you send out your own email to saying, “We’re going to do a live stream at this point with a Q&A about our film”.

Is there an attitude or approach which you’ve seen in filmmakers that’s helped build their careers, not just for that one film but across a body of work that ultimately will see them be successful or at least, to set the bar quite low, be able to make a sustainable living from their work, which is very hard?

It shouldn’t be the thing that you have to worry about, but it’s actually quite a high bar to manage to do that in and of itself. My first thing would be, be kind to yourself. Social media can force a level of comparison and self-punishment of, ‘that person’s doing this and look how successful they’ve been’. There’s always balance in life. Not everything is like it is on Instagram. At times it’s whatever way you have to earn money. I literally taught time management workshops to freelance artists so that I could afford to try and be a freelance creative. That was me sitting in an office block in West Bromwich for four hours every weekend but it paid me enough money to get me through the week. But at the end of the day, keep your eyes on the prize and just make stuff! Even if you’re making a weird little film with your phone on the bus on the way to a day job that has nothing to do with what you want to be and where you want to take things. I think in the UK in particular, partly because of how our world is structured, we are incredibly lucky to have public funding bodies and an infrastructure around that, as challenged and as complex as it can be.

Sean Baker made films on iPhones for a reason to start with. You’ve got to get out there and start making. I think sometimes in the UK we wait for permission a little bit too much and also as a very theatrical and literary nation, we sometimes spend too much time perfecting this thing, like the script is its own work of art and actually it’s your template for shooting. For me, it’s about flying hours, you need to be there making stuff and you don’t need a super techno crane, the latest Alexa, all the sexiest lenses or whatever it might be. You can just go out and do it with your phone. Do stuff, learn from it, get it out there if you want to get it out there and listen to what the audience thinks, or don’t get it out there and use it for something internal. I’ve held on to that ever since I scrabbled enough money together to go and see Shane Meadows do a Q&A at Watershed in Bristol. He talked about how he made these scrappy little sketches with a VHS camera, his mate Paddy Considine and a bag of fancy dress stuff and they would experiment. But that’s where half of his first features came out of – the tiny kernel of an idea became A Room for Romeo Brass or something else. He was drawing on his own experience, but also finding that space to play. I think it’s very important giving yourself permission to do that because that, for me, shows who Shane has become and what kind of filmmaker he is.

Keep your eyes on the prize and just make stuff! Even if you’re making a weird little film with your phone on the bus on the way to a day job that has nothing to do with what you want to be and where you want to take things.

All of the really great, exciting filmmakers like Clio Barnard or Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the DNA of what they do even when they’re at the top of their game and winning awards at Sundance or the BAFTAs, etc. the kernels are there in their short films. You can look at Christopher Nolan’s first ever feature Following, which he shot on weekends, and he purposely wrote so it didn’t matter if the hair of the actors changed because they had to get a haircut. He shot it completely illegally, like down by his knees in Covent Garden on a Super 16 camera or something. I swear when you watch that you can see where Memento and all of his obsessions come from. You can see that in Andrea Arnold, in Alma Har’el, in Barry Jenkins, all of those incredible directors. I spent a long time digging into that stuff at NOWNESS. I’d be like, show us your first short, can we put that on the channel? It’s more interesting actually than the latest sexy thing you’ve done with funding because this is where we’ll inspire filmmakers. So dig into that and lose yourself in those early films. That’s where ideas pop out from. Gareth Edwards famously started in his bedroom and paved his way by learning and doing the VFX for Walking with Dinosaurs. Then he got to make Star Wars down the line because he went and made Monsters. Those things aren’t just inspirational origin stories, they show a level of determination, but also a need to just keep making. So that would be my advice.

Keep an eye on Directors Notes for our interviews with this year’s BAFTA nominated short film directors ahead of the awards ceremony on the 16th February. You can also read/watch all our BAFTA filmmaker interviews from previous years right now.

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