Neil McCartney
- Producer
- Director
- Editor
Neil McCartney has been active in the UK film industry for 30 years. First as the founding editor in 1988 of Screen Finance, the specialist newsletter on the film business which was part of a family of publications that he set up and ran in partnership with the Financial Times for 20 years. During this time he generated the first regular and comprehensive statistics on the workings of the national industry, including the number of UK films made each year (and their budgets), as well as breakdowns of whether they were wholly UK-produced or were majority or minority co-productions, and how many of these films were eventually picked up by distributors for theatrical release, how many went straight to video or television, and how many were never shown to the public at all. He was also one of the founders of the British Independent Film Awards in 1998. He was also for many years and adviser to Raindance Film Festival in London. He became UK representative of the Moscow International Film Festival in 2002 (which he still is) and has subsequently acted as an advisor to other festivals such as the Sindh International Film Festival in Pakistan (2014), the Golden Island International Film Festival in Cyprus (2014) and the Alanya International Film Festival in Turkey (2016). Between 2006 and 2017 he was chair of The Independent Film Trust, a UK-registered charity which exists to advance the cause of independent film-making. Among other things he helped to set up the arrangement with Raindance under which the two organisations run a masters programme which leads to an MA or MSc in Film by Negotiated Learning, which is accredited by Staffordshire University. Since 2010 he has been chair of the University of Cambridge Alumni Group for Film and Other Media. After producing a number of shorts he co-produced his first feature, Season of Mists in 2008. Since then he has had producer credits on a dozen other features, with several more in development. He is a member of the European Film Academy and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, as well as being a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.