The British Independent Film Awards will make some changes to celebrate its 25th Anniversary. They are going gender-neutral for their acting categories, as well as adding new performance awards, a category for debut directors in feature documentaries, and two music prizes.
It is possible to get rid of “actress”And “actor”Honors, BIFA joins other orgs like the MTV Movie Awards, the Berlin Film Festival, and the BRITs.
BIFA says it will now present five acting awards: Best Lead Performance, Best Supporting Performance, Best Joint Lead Performance — for two (or exceptionally three) performances that are the joint focus of a film — and Best Ensemble. BIFA’s established Breakthrough Performance award (which was already non-gender specific) remains unchanged.
There will be up to 10 nominations in each of the Lead and Supporting performance categories, and up to five for the Joint Lead Performance or Ensemble races.
In addition, BIFA is adding a Best Debut Director – Feature Documentary category, to sit alongside the Douglas Hickox Award for Best Debut Director. The fiction feature category will receive the award. The award for Best Music, which had previously been awarded to both original composition and music supervision will now be divided into Best Original Music or Best Music Supervision.
Deena Wallace and Amy Gustin, BIFA directors, commented. “We’re very excited to be able to launch BIFA’s new expanded awards categories which will more fully capture the range of exceptional performances and acting talent in British independent film and allow us to celebrate even more talent than ever before.”
The 2022 nominations are announced on November 3. The ceremony will take place December 4.
BIFA welcomed several new members to its Board, including Dominic Buchanan (award winning producer and head Home Team); Carmen Thompson (cultural curator for We Are Parable, producer at Aya Films); and Tim Platt (Head Marketing and Audience Development at the British Film Institute).
New dates for BIFA’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion training, running from July until January 2023 are confirmed. This training program includes Anti-Bullying and Harassment and Fair Recruitment in the Workplace and courses on Unconscious Bias. It is supported by ScreenSkills’ Film Skills Fund with contributions from UK film production. Also new for 2022 is Budgeting & Scheduling for Virtual Production in partnership with Treehouse Digital supported by ScreenSkills as part of the BFI Future Film Skills program using funds from the National Lottery.