Next generation of filmmakers commissioned to tell NHS Untold Film Stories

NHS Untold Film Stories see three emerging filmmakers awarded up to £20,000 each to make new short films inspired by the BFI National Archive’s NHS on Film collection.

These new films will help to tell untold stories of the NHS, taking audiences on a journey across the UK and as far afield as India, to mark 75 years since the NHS was established in 1948. 

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in partnership with the BFI, the three filmmakers were selected from over 100 applications. Early in their careers, this opportunity represents the first major commission for these filmmaking teams.

The films either respond directly to the archive NHS on Film collection or creatively reuse extracts from a curated selection of films preserved by the BFI to reflect on the gaps in the story of the NHS as told through film. 

The filmmaking teams will involve the public in their creative process. They will work with their local communities or partner organisations to tell their stories and share their lived experience of either working in the NHS or accessing healthcare in 21st century Britain.

They will also have the opportunity to work with academic adviser for the project, award-winning filmmaker and researcher, Dr Shane O’Sullivan from Kingston School of Art.

The films will premiere at a special screening at BFI Southbank during the annual Being Human Festival 2023 in November.

After this, they will be showcased through local screenings in the places where the films were made and for the people and communities that inspired the themes behind the films.

The films will also be taken into the BFI National Archive and will become part of the NHS on Film Collection.

Sara David and her filmmaking team will create an experimental documentary that traces the compelling stories of three Indian women. The three women, including the filmmaker’s mother, trained together in India, became friends and came to work as nurses in the NHS in the 1990s. David’s film will be based around a conversation over the dinner table where the friends come together and explore their interwoven and untold stories. It responds to the lack of ethnic diversity in the NHS on Film collection and using audio from films in the collection,

Dermot O’Dempsey’s animated documentary aims to demystify the complexities and share the raw emotions of children’s palliative care, creatively reusing NHS on Film archival footage. The filmmaking team will collaborate with healthcare professionals, families and partner organisations Barnardo’s, Heard, St Oswalds and Spitfire Audio in the north of England and Scotland.

El Jones’s and Raviv Piccus’s film will engage the trans and non-binary community in Birmingham to help source their untold stories into a collaboratively written verbatim drag anthology on accessing healthcare. It is a contemporary and engaging update on the public information films within the NHS on Film collection. The film also aims to help healthcare professionals, and especially GPs, understand the challenges that the trans and non-binary community face.

From the hundreds of archival film related to the NHS held in the BFI National Archive, 79 have been selected for the NHS on Film collection on BFI Player, many of the films were commissioned by the Central Office of Information between 1948 and 2012.

Since the creation of the NHS, talented filmmakers have worked on dramas, documentaries and animations to produce a mixture of public information, recruitment and training films that cover a wide range of subjects relating to health and social care. Over the 60 plus years of filmmaking, the films have reflected the changing nature of capturing healthcare on camera, a change in the focus of public health and bigger societal changes.

As part of its NHS 75th anniversary public engagement programme, AHRC has funded a writer-in-residence, Dr Kim Moore, who is attached to Trafford General Hospital in Manchester. The hospital was the first NHS hospital to be opened by Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan in July 1948.

Dr Moore will be supporting health workers to tell their own NHS stories through creative writing. It will culminate in an exhibition and anthology of creative writing produced by NHS staff and curated by Dr Moore. The exhibition will begin with a launch event in July at the Manchester Poetry Library and will run until September 2023.

Windrush NHS Stories is a parallel strand of the Untold Stories project. It will see Manchester City of Literature Community Champion Jackie Bailey supporting members of African-Caribbean communities to tell their stories of working lives in the NHS. This will mark the 75th anniversary this year of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in Britain.