The Hollywood star Forest Whitaker is leading a push to get black British film-makers out of the ghetto they have been placed in and into the multiplexes.
The actor and director best known for his roles in the Oscar winner The Crying Game, Platoon and The Color of Money has set up a unit within FilmFour, the pay-TV channel, to bring black and Asian writers and directors through the glass ceiling.
"This is not something I am doing for fun. This is a business opportunity," said Whitaker yesterday. "I am in this to make films.
"The talent is there but the films are not being made, and those that are not being seen."
The unexpected success of the rip-roaring comedy East Is East, which is set to displace Trainspotting as the highest grossing fully-funded British film ever made, proves that black British films can have a mass international audience, according to Whitaker, who has directed such commercial hits as Waiting to Exhale and Hope Floats.
"I am here to make universal stories and build a film community by using the talent that maybe up till now has been frustrated," he said.
A study by the British Film Institute confirmed what black film-makers have known years: that the money men shy away from anything that has "black" elements because they see it as a box office loser.
Leslee Udwin, producer of East Is East, which won the Bafta for the outstanding British film of the year, said she had to fight every step of the way to get her film made. "We were fighting against the idea that it was a small film and a black film, and that it wouldn't do any business. It was hard but we won in the end."
The comedy, about a mixed race family who run a fish and chip shop in Salford, has taken nearly $26m (£16.25m) worldwide so far and got tremendous reviews when it opened in America last week.
Whitaker hopes slowly to change the culture at all levels. He will encourage young directors to make shorts from the internet, and bring writers, directors and producers together to work on projects in his "film lab", which will be tied up with his company, Spirit Dance Entertainment.
But the main focus will be on script development. "The big goal is to make films people want to see," said Whitaker. There had been a lack of ambition for black films, a lack of marketing. "FilmFour really believed in East Is East - and see what happened."
There was plenty of black British talent at all levels, including the directors Isaac Julien, of Young Soul Rebels, and Gurinder Chadha, of Bhaji on the Beach, and actors such as Thandie Newton and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, but "talent has to be allowed to work. Look at Marianne. What has she done since she got that Oscar nomination for Secrets and Lies?"
The BFI report, A Fuller Picture, said the six 1990s "black" films it studied - Babymother, Bhaji on the Beach, The Crying Game, Dancehall Queen, Secrets and Lies and Welcome II the Terrordome - were mostly caught in a "vicious chicken and egg situation". They were seen as high risk because there had not been any real hit black British films, nor were there any big enough black British stars to anchor them.
The report attributed part of the problem to the absence of senior black executives in the industry in Britain, something Whitaker's initiative hopes to correct eventually.
Paul Webster, head of FilmFour, said: "Forest is a very practical inspiration to the community. This isn't simply more film industry tokenism; it's the real deal."
But Whitaker has his work cut out. One depressing table of statistics in the report shows that black British films made less money here than even imported African-American ones. The relatively successful Bhaji on the Beach, made for £1.1m, took £309,715, while Babymother, which was twice as expensive, took only £65,600 and the ultra-low budget Welcome II the Terrordome only £5,000.
"No one wants to lose money," said Whitaker. "But there you can also set up a film to fail if you don't market it and really go over the script to make sure it is right before you go ahead with it."
