BFI in America – Friends of the BFI

The Friends of the BFI is a California-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation that supports the work of the BFI around the world.

The BFI is the UK ’s lead organisation for film and the moving image.

We believe society needs stories. Film, television and the moving image bring them to life, helping us to connect and understand each other better. We share the stories of yesterday, search for the stories of today, and shape the stories of tomorrow.

A key element of our mission is to grow and care for the BFI National Archive, the world’s largest film and television archive.

With over one million film and television titles from 1895 to the present day, the collections include original camera negatives of some of the most significant achievements in the history of cinema, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). The archive also contains more than 20,000 silent films, and the largest collection of American silent films outside the US .

Film is an extremely fragile medium, and the BFI spends $14m a year just to maintain its collections, which require expert care under exacting conditions. These state-of-the-art facilities could not be maintained without the generous support of so many individuals and partners.

The Friends of the BFI hosts regular screenings in the US . Our first event took place in late 2014 with an exclusive preview of Mr. Turner (Dir. Mike Leigh. UK 2014) in San Francisco, attended by the film’s Oscar-nominated lead, Timothy Spall.

Other San Francisco highlights have included a preview of Suffragette (Dir. Sarah Gavron. UK 2015) with a Q&A with the film’s producer, Alison Owen, and a screening with live musical accompaniment of the BFI National Archive’s restoration of the 1928 silent film Shooting Stars (Dirs. Anthony Asquith, AV Bramble. UK 1928) at the magnificent Castro Theatre, in partnership with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

In November 2017, we returned to San Francisco with a screening of Journey’s End (Dir. Saul Dibb. UK 2017) and a Q&A with cast and crew including Sam Claflin and Paul Bettany, at Lucasfilm. We were also delighted to take the film and its team to New York for our inaugural event in the city at the Warner Bros. screening room in Midtown Manhattan.

As we look to the year ahead in 2022, we are delighted to be returning to the US .  Look out for future event announcements.

If you would like to donate online, please visit our online giving page .

To donate by check or wire transfer, or for more information on how to support the Friends of the BFI , please contact Hannah Clifford:

Hannah Clifford
+44 (0) 20 7815 4605
hannah.clifford@bfi.org.uk

Friends of the British Film Institute is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Donations to it are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. EIN : 95-4334449.