LONDON — In a small square in Soho, central London, a building full of people are watching a lifetime’s worth of films.
Every cinema release, every advert, every TV show and every DVD extra that’s legally available to purchase in the UK goes through them first. They’re the gatekeepers of what we watch.
These people make up the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the independent body behind the colourful little age rating certificates stamped into the corners of British DVDs.
2016 has been a busy year for the BBFC. In January, it fell under the media spotlight after film-maker Charlie Lyne forced them to watch a film about paint drying on a wall in order to protest film censorship. He crowd-funded almost £6000 ($8720), which allowed him to submit 10 hours of footage (the BBFC charge per minute), and the stunt gained so much attention on Reddit that the BBFC’s site was temporarily brought down. Read more…
More about Bbfc, Life Of Brian, The Woman In Black, Paint Drying, and The Dark Knight
