In 2017 as celebration of its heritage, BAFTA showcased seven extraordinary winning features from the early years of the Award in a nationwide tour. Accompanied by powerful opening statements by precocious debutantes, all now doyens, making their entrances to British film-making during the nineties and noughties.
The period of the selected films, from 1998 to 2009, is important. The first decade of the millennium ushered in a new wave of outstanding British filmmakers seeking in differing ways to address the disorientating contrasts and artificially buried tensions of contemporary British culture, tensions which are today erupting.
Carl Foreman’s sudden fall brought into sharp relief how the glittering Hollywood milieu of consumerist 1950s America had all along been vulnerable to powerful reactionary hysteria directed against it. The young filmmakers we showcase on our tour cut their teeth during a very different epoch, one hallmarked more by disquiet and frenetic greed than state witch-hunts, but their experience of a booming nation perilously ignoring profound strains influenced their work.
In the opening years of a sunny new millennium, Britain experienced a roaring economic recovery driven by glamorous new media and exciting technological change. A resolution to the long-running civil strife in Ulster promised an era of peace and prosperity within an expanding and harmonious Europe. The national narrative preached popular satisfaction with rapid progress, supposedly accessible career ladders, and European integration.
But beneath this complacency there were ominous rumblings: tensions over Britain’s involvement with costly and ill-defined foreign wars; brief but intense ethnic riots at home; spectacular outbursts of mainland terrorism; and a pervading air of financial, cultural and political corruption. A growing resentment of ‘otherness’ lurked behind the official welcoming of unprecedented mass-immigration, and there was an uneasy feeling that many communities were starting to be forgotten or left behind by a London-centric elite. Warnings that Britain’s boom was built on little more than a quicksand of loose credit and lazy illusions went unheeded, until the ‘Icarus-decade’ suddenly crashed to earth amid banking panics, revelations about the debauchery of public officials, and the rise of political extremism.
Here we look at some of the directors and writers wo have been Debuts and were attuned to these societal contradictions long before they became evident. Many of these themes were embedded, often from surprising perspectives, within their first outings as feature-makers. If one thread could be said to run through all the films, from starkly differing angles, it is the struggle to preserve a sense of personal identity when one feels like an outsider in a confusing, hostile, alien or fragmenting environment.
