Mamoun Hassan obituary: filmmaker, British film industry leader and passionate believer in cinema

Although his name rarely appeared on the credits, Mamoun Hassan had an indelible influence on British films made in the 1970s and 1980s, as the holder of key posts in official bodies as well as a passionate believer in cinema both as a vibrant art form and a reflection of our culture at its most diverse. 

Born in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Hassan moved with his parents to Britain in 1949, where they eventually settled in St John’s Wood. He attended the radical King Alfred School in Hampstead, and then while studying electrical engineering at University College, London, he also worked as an editing assistant to Kevin Brownlow on documentaries. 

During this time he discovered his true vocation was in the world of cinema, and he turned down a job in electrical engineering to gain more experience in filmmaking. He directed a 10-minute drama in Great Malvern, The Meeting, which won best short film prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1965.

His personal energy and obvious talents led him to become head of the BFI Production Board in 1971, where he expanded the programme to encompass feature films, among them Peter Smith’s A Private Enterprise (1974), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley (1975), Horace Ove’s Pressure (1976), David Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village (1976) and perhaps most significantly, the Bill Douglas trilogy – My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home (1972 to 1978). It was while at the BFI he also supported Terence Davies on his first film, Children (1976), an association that led to Davies giving Hassan a ‘special thanks’ on Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). 

Following the collapse of a feature film project he was to direct, Hassan was offered the post of the head of film production in Lebanon with the UNWRA. There he made the documentary Some of the Palestinians (1974), which won an award at the London Film Festival. In 1976, Hassan returned to Britain to take up his next significant position, as head of directing at the National Film and Television School. Just over a decade later, he assembled students from the school in front of television cameras for an analysis of a ‘classic’ film in the Channel 4 series Movie Masterclass (1990 to 1992). He brought in Lindsay Anderson, Terence Davies, Bill Forsyth and Jack Gold to act as the voices of authority, taking on that role himself for two of his favourite films, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959). These choices revealed him to be a firm believer in the power of cinema as an international form of storytelling in a great humanist tradition, and in the director as the presiding author of the work.

While working at the NFTS, Hassan became one of the founding members of the committee of the Association of Independent Producers (AIP). Thanks to his policy paper for AIP on the future of the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) in 1979, he was invited by the minister of trade and industry to join the board of the NFFC. He then became their managing director, the first filmmaker to be entrusted with the distribution of modest government funding (much below the level available to the BFI today) for production. His first act was to reconstitute the board of the National Film Development Fund, which had previously only included writers, to bring in producers, directors and exhibitors as well, in order to see that the scripts they favoured actually made their way to the screen. Films that were supported in this way included Another Country (1984) and Dance with a Stranger (1985). 

Many of the films that benefited from NFFC funding in this period reveal Hassan’s wide concerns and taste, beginning with Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980), a script that had previously been rejected by everyone. An uncompromising look at Black youth and racial tensions in south London, in recent years it has been re-assessed as a major British film. This was followed by Bill Forsyth’s enchanting Gregory’s Girl (1980), Lindsay Anderson’s satire Britannia Hospital (1982) and Jimmy Murakami’s animated version of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows  (1986). Hassan continued his determined support of Bill Douglas by seeing through his ambitious feature film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades (1986).

For the most part these films were made in Britain with wholly British talent, but Hassan had ambitions to embrace a more international perspective and one less preoccupied with social realism. When some projects failed to win sufficient support from his board, including Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982), Merchant Ivory’s Heat and Dust (1983) and Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), Hassan would encourage others to back them through different means.

He explained his viewpoint to Sight and Sound in 1981: “It is not allowed for a director who works in our culture to set up questions to which there are no immediate answers. Or no answers at all. And although film buffs are likely to forgive Tarkovsky, when he fails to enable them to understand him, they will not forgive a British director. There is no tradition here of that kind of film where the journey itself is more exciting than talking about the destination.”

Perhaps partly through the frustration of dealing with so many clashing interests and disappointing box office returns, and partly because of his struggles with government policy for the public funding of British films, Hassan quit the NFFC after six years. He took on producing No Surrender (1985), written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Peter Smith. In the 1990s, he embraced various assignments in countries as disparate as Zimbabwe, Australia and Cuba, where he taught at the International Film School. He also worked as a British representative at the European Script Fund, as well as in an advisory role with Eurimages, while his skills as a teacher found him work at film schools all over the world.

Hassan’s personal creativity resurfaced when he joined forces with the Chilean director Andres Wood, serving as co-writer and producer on Machuca (2004) and La buena vida (2008). As in Britain, wherever he worked he always immersed himself in films in which cultural significance and artistic integrity far outweighed any obvious commercial values.

• Mamoun Hassan, 12 December 1937 to 29 July 2022