ABSTRACT
The chapter is built around a set of interviews with young people who attended the early years of a course run by the British Film Institute (BFI) in England, known as the Film Academy. Despite the fact that competition for jobs in the creative and cultural industries—especially in film or TV production—is intense and despite the fact that there is a huge pool of reserve labour often ‘between jobs,’ there is still significant political (and in the UK at any rate, policy) interest in developing opportunities and access for young people in these employment fields. The chapter does not evaluate the success of the intervention. It focuses on the ways that young people took up and interpreted the trajectory of becoming a filmmaker—not just suggested by participating in this course, but how these sorts of opportunities intersected with other ways of imagining a creative career. It suggests that participating in this course enabled these young people to practice new modes of careership, introducing them to ways of imagining, marking, and negotiating their futures in ways that, ironically, the rationale for the course, with its focus on introducing professional filmmaking practices, was unprepared for. It explores the contradictory relationship between the school examination system that identifies individual performance and a creative filmmaking culture that emphasises collegiality and collaboration, arguing that the young people themselves focused on forms of identity validation through peer recognition and the development of cultural capital.
