Neil McCartney

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Neil McCartney

Neil McCartney is a UK-born journalist, consultant, producer and entrepreneur.

He has been co-founder of a number of initiatives, including a series of specialist newsletters for the Financial Times in the 1980s, the British Independent Film Awards in 1998, and more recently a group of companies which are creating sustainable forestry plantations in developing countries, including NICOL Forests UK Limited. He is chairman of The Independent Film Trust, a UK charity set up to advance the cause of independent film-making, and of the Cambridge Film and Media Academy, an alumnus group for Cambridge University graduates working in film, television and new media. As IFT chairman he helped to set up the masters programme run by the IFT, Raindance and Staffordshire University which leads to an MA or MSc in Film by Negotiated Learning. He is a member of the advisory board of the newly created Amsterdam Film School. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the European Film Academy and of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Journalism

McCartney attended Ormskirk Grammar School and then studied Natural Sciences at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge and social and economic sciences at Imperial College in London. Having written a thesis on new media while at Imperial in 1980, McCartney produced numerous articles on the subject and co-authored the book Hunt on Cable TV: Chaos or Coherence? which was published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom in 1982. He then became a freelance journalist in media and telecommunications. He was a founding editor of Screen Finance and Mobile Communications, the FT newsletters on the film and mobile telephone industries, which he ran for more than 10 years, along with other titles including Telecom Markets and New Media Markets, until these were taken over by the Informa Group in 2000. During this time he chaired the judging panel for the FT Global Telecoms Awards.

While editing Screen Finance he was responsible for developing and implementing a programme of research which generated the first-ever set of comprehensive statistics on UK film production, distribution and exhibition. From the early 1990s this data formed the core of the report on the UK film industry that appeared each year in the annual yearbook of the British Film Institute. Eventually the UK Film Council, which was set up in 2000 to develop and promote the UK film industry, set up its own statistics division. When the Council closed in 2011, this was transferred to the BFI where it continues to operate today.

He continues to write for national newspapers, to act as a commentator for organisations such as the BBC, Sky and The Observer to speak at conferences and similar events and to serve on industry judging panels.

Consultancy

McCartney is managing director of McCartney Media, a consultancy which specialises in media and telecommunications. Past and present private clients include Alcatel, AT&T, BellSouth, Bertelsmann, the BBC, the British Film Institute, BT, Canal Plus Group, CBS, Deutsche Telekom, Granada, Hutchison 3G, IPC Media, ITV, Motorola, Nokia, Openwave, Orange, Qualcomm, Television South, Vodafone, Warner Brothers and the European Commission. It also works with the Raindance Film Festival.

It is through this company that McCartney works with the Amsterdam Film School, which is currently scaling up its English-language operations after starting with mainly Dutch-language services.

Production

McCartney has produced a number of short films and has production credits on six completed features, with another four projects at various stages.

He started with three international features which he produced or co-produced. The first of these, Season of Mists (Sezon tumanov), was a UK-Russia co-production which won a number of prizes at international festivals. The second film, the Russian feature Zone of Turbulence (Zona turbulentnosti), also won several prizes, while The Empty Home (Pustoy dom), a Kyrgyzstan-Russia-France-UK co-production, was Kyrgyzstan’s official selection for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.

The Empty Home received its world premiere in June 2012 at the 37th Seattle International Film Festival, where it was ranked best film by the unofficial group ratcityfilmsociety. A few days later it won the Best Director prize at the 10th Almaty International Film Festival "Shaken’s Stars", in Kazakhstan. Later that month it was shown at the "Kinotavr" festival in Sochi, Russia’s largest festival of national films, and at the Moscow International Film Festival. In July it was screened at the "Golden Apricot" IFF in Yerevan in Armenia, and in August and September at the Montreal IFF in Canada, the "Moscow Premiere" festival, and the "Love is Folly" IFF in Varna in Bulgaria. On 15 September, it was the opening film at the "Kinoshok" FF of the CIS and Baltic countries. Other festivals at which it has been shown include: Orenburg IFF (Russia – October 2012), Busan IFF (South Korea – October 2012), Osaka Asian FF (Japan – March 2013), Sofia IFF (Bulgaria - March 2013), Tiburon IFF (Tiburon, USA – April 2013) and Silk Screen Asian American FF (Pittsburgh, USA – May 2013). In December 2013 it won the Prize of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the "Stalker" International Film Festival on Human Rights in Moscow.

Next McCartney was executive producer on Finding Family, a feature documentary shot in the UK and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which tells the true-life story of Oggi Tomic and was co-directed by Tomic and Chris Leslie. It had its world premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2013 and its UK premiere in November 2013 at a charity screening at the Vue cinema in Leicester Square. In March 2014 the film won two prizes at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards ceremony in Glasgow. It was voted Best Factual production and Best New Work (sponsored by Channel 4). In May 2014 it won two Golden Apple awards at the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) in New York – the Jury Award for Best Documentary and the Audience Award for the Best Picture. It has also been shown at a number of other festivals.

McCartney's fifth film, on which he was executive producer, was the feature documentary One Humanity, which was shot in South Africa, the UK and the USA, and which was simultaneously premiered in Pretoria and London on 27 April 2014, as part of the celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa - the elections which brought Nelson Mandela to power just four years after he was released from prison on Robben Island.

His sixth feature, on which he was again executive producer, was the Russian-language documentary Mamayev kurgan. Pamyat pokoleniy (Mamai’s Burial Mound. Memories of Generations), about the giant Russian war monument The Motherland Calls, built in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) to commemorate the Soviet Union's victory in the crucial battle which took place there between 23rd August 1942 and 2nd February 1943. This has been shown at a number of festivals and is due to be screened on the Russian television channel Zvezda (TV channel) later this year.

He is currently helping to produce a number of new feature projects.

One is the recently completed Turkish-language documentary Sira Disi İnsanlar (Extraordinary People), written and directed by Orhan Tekeoglu, which has been selected for the documentary section of the 52nd International Antalya Film Festival (IAFF).

Another three projects, all collaborations with Evgenia Tirdatova as writer/director, are a completed documentary with the working title Konstantin Rokossovsky, about the Polish-born officer in the Red Army who was released from Stalin's prisons to become a Soviet war hero, the in-post-production documentary, Rudolf Nureyev: Island of His Dreams, and an in-development drama loosely based on Nureyev's life,.

He is also working on the fictional feature The Window, written and directed by Koutaiba Al Janabi, which is due to go into production in April 2016.

McCartney also acts as UK representative for the Moscow International Film Festival, was a member of the selection committee of the first International Volgograd Film Forum "Stalingrad Lilacs", on 8–13 May 2013, and was for many years a director of the media production company Tribute Inspirations Limited, organiser of the Listen Campaign which is working to raise money for children’s charity projects. He played a significant role in programming and arranging the Raindance Selection of films at the 1st Sindh International Film Festival in Karachi on 10–11 February 2014, where he also acted as one of the judges. He is also an advisor to the Golden Island International Film Festival (GIIFF), which he helped to launch in Cyprus in May 2014.

Charity

The IFT supports ventures and initiatives that encourage an interest in film production and help emerging film-makers to develop and express themselves. It works to raise the profile of independent films which might otherwise not be available to a particular audience. It also funds activities such as basic film courses for the disadvantaged and the provision of training scholarships for those who have demonstrated talent but need financial help. In October 2010 the IFT-backed short film Night Music, a 12-minute animation by Paul Jacques which was made as part of the Vision Shorts film-making initiative for people recovering from mental health problems, was premiered at the Raindance Film Festival.

This course was run in partnership with Portugal Prints, part of the mental-health charity Westminster Mind in Central London, which deals with adults recovering from mental-health problems. Courses have also been run with a series of other partners, including Wandsworth City Learning Centre in South-West London (which brought together a group of participants aged 10 to 15 from four different schools), Stoke Newington School in Hackney in North London (with a group of students aged 15 and 16), The Hampton Project, an educational charity based in South London, which works with young people who have been excluded from mainstream education because they have committed a criminal offence or are felt to be at risk of doing so, Pursuing Independent Paths (PIP), a Central London charity concerned with adults with learning difficulties, The Link primary school in Croydon in South London, which focuses on schoolchildren with similar problems, Chelsea Community Hospital School (CCHS), which is housed in the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in West London and also works at three other hospital sites in London, and the New Horizon Youth Centre (NHYC), which serves homeless young people in the Somers Town area.

These courses have been the subject of two television programmes broadcast by the Community Channel, the national television channel run by the Media Trust.

Since 2008, the IFT has partnered with the Raindance Film Festival in a programme under which the winner of a specified RFF award gets the opportunity to direct the trailer for the following year’s festival, with a cash contribution from the IFT towards production costs. In 2015, this was linked to the Special Jury Prize which went to Filippo Capuzzi Lapietra for The House Job.

The IFT also sponsors the RFF award for Film of the Festival (Short) which has since 2012 carried the right of qualification to the judging procedure for the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short, without the usual requirement of having achieved a theatrical release. In 2015 this award was won by Winter Light, directed by Julian Higgins.

In 2012, the same award was won by Buzkashi Boys, directed by Sam French and produced by The Afghan Project, which he helped to set up. This film got as far as being one of the five nominations for the Academy Award, before losing out to Curfew, by Shawn Christensen.

In 2013, McCartney devised a project to provide the 21st edition of the Raindance Film Festival with its first-ever set of physical awards (in previous editions the award-winners had been presented with certificates). He commissioned six artists to contribute 10 pieces of original artwork which were presented to the winners at the awards ceremony on 5 October 2013.

Since 2007, the IFT has also sponsored the Raindance Award which is presented each year at the British Independent Film Awards to the feature which the jury selects as the one that is best representative of the spirit of independent film-making. Members of the production team behind the winning film gain access to a training scholarship which is funded by the IFT and organised in co-operation with Raindance.

In the most recent example, the Raindance Award went to Luna at the BIFA event on 7 December 2014, so the scholarship went to Dave McKean, the writer/director, and Simon Moorhead, the producer (the film had already won Best UK Feature at the Raindance Film Festival the previous October).

Previous winners of the IFT/Raindance award and scholarship include Rob Savage (for Strings), Koutaiba Al Janabi (for Leaving Baghdad), and Isabelle Stead (for Son of Babylon).

In 2014, the IFT also set up a scholarship with the National Film and Television School (NFTS) to enable a student to study on the latter’s course in Creative Business for Entrepreneurs and Executives (CBEE).

McCartney also acts as one of the mentors on the Raindance/IFT/SU masters programme, which was launched in 2011. Raindance/IFT was the first outside body to be validated by the university to deliver such a course, having been approved in August 2012 as a franchise partner.

The creation of an online version of the programme, which was launched in October 2012, makes it available to students based anywhere in the world with access to a broadband internet connection. In theory, a student could progress all the way to a master's degree without ever attending a designated physical location or actually meeting any of their tutors. That is, provided that they had handed in work and projects that met the assignment guidelines and postgraduate requirements (and kept up-to-date on fees). The programme is highly flexible and allows the students to choose their own modules, and design and deliver them through self-directed learning with Raindance supplying support, tutorials and access to its wide and varied range of classes.

The Cambridge Film and Media Academy (CAMFA) exists to promote an awareness and appreciation within the colleges and the University of film, television and associated areas and to bring together aspiring student programme makers and established alumni professionals.

In October 2014, McCartney became an Ambassador of the Cambridge-based Humanitarian Centre (which in October 2015 was renamed the Centre for Global Equality).

In June 2015, he became a member of the Mentor Advisory Panel of the Queen's Young Leaders Programme (QYLP) which was set up in July 2014 by the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, in partnership with Comic Relief and The Royal Commonwealth Society. Its purpose is to discover, celebrate and support young people from every corner of the Commonwealth who are transforming their own lives and the lives of others.