ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly, the scale and big-budget spends of Hollywood have overshadowed British film production, making it harder for UK filmmakers to find the financial backing or sufficient audience interest to make domestic production truly sustainable. Despite that, UK-based production does periodically achieve huge commercial success despite its low-budget presence and art house dominated distribution. British social realism, perhaps, has endured as a result of both the BBC and the BFI's role in funding UK production, whose diversity-oriented remits provide an easy fit for British documentary realism's regional settings and working-class characters. Increasingly, the British realist tradition has focused upon gender-based issues, using film narratives to explore the shifting expectations of both women and men in contemporary Britain. Social realism too has attempted to diagnose how gender and class intersect – to scope how poverty magnifies gender-based inequalities in the UK.
