ABSTRACT
In late March 1995, two seemingly unrelated events took place which could be seen symbolically to represent and exemplify the direction which regional film and video policy took in Britain in the 1980s. At the 1995 Oscar ceremony, Peter Capaldi’s short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a production co-funded by the Scottish Film Production Fund and BBC Scotland, shared an Oscar for best short live action film. 1 The Scottish Film Production Fund is one of a network of publicly funded, culturally driven schemes across Britain and this was the first time that any such scheme has received such major official recognition. The second event was an advertisement in the ‘Creative and Media’ pages of The Guardian newspaper inviting applications for the post of Business Development Adviser to Cultural Industries in Coventry. What was most interesting and significant about this post was that it was located within the local authority—Coventry City Council. The role of the arts and cultural industries in economic development and industrial regeneration had now unequivocally found its place in the sun.
