The British Film Institute (BFI) is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:

The BFI runs the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre (NFT)) and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London. The IMAX has the largest cinema screen in the UK, and shows popular recent releases and short films showcasing its technology, which includes 3D screenings and 12,000 watts of digital surround sound. BFI Southbank (the National Film Theatre screens and the Studio) shows films from all over the world particularly critically acclaimed historical & specialised films that may not otherwise get a cinema showing. The BFI also distributes archival and cultural cinema to other venues - each year to more than 800 venues all across the UK, as well as to a substantial number of overseas venues.

The BFI runs the annual London Film Festival along with the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the youth-orientated Future Film Festival.

The BFI offers a range of education initiatives, in particular to support the teaching of film and media studies in schools.

The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry enjoyed a 'golden age' in the 1940s, led by the studios of J. Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda.

The British directors Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean are among the most critically acclaimed of all-time, with other important directors including Charlie Chaplin,Michael Powell,Carol Reed and Ridley Scott. Many British actors have achieved international fame and critical success, including Julie Andrews,Richard Burton,Michael Caine, Charlie Chaplin,Sean Connery,Vivien Leigh,David Niven,Laurence Olivier,Peter Sellers and Kate Winslet. Some of the most commercially successful films of all time have been produced in the United Kingdom, including the two highest-grossing film franchises (Harry Potter and James Bond).Ealing Studios has a claim to being the oldest continuously working film studio facility in the world.

Thomas William "Tom" Hiddleston (born 9 February 1981) is an English film, television, radio, and stage actor. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and he rose to prominence through a number of TV roles and more recently major film roles. He played Loki in the 2011 Marvel Studios film Thor, Captain Nicholls in Steven Spielberg's World War I film War Horse (2011), and also Freddie Page in the British drama The Deep Blue Sea, alongside Rachel Weisz. He played author F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris (2011). He returned to his role as Loki in The Avengers (2012) and is set to reprise the character again for Thor 2 (2013).

Hiddleston was born in Westminster, London, to parents Diana Patricia (née Servaes), a former stage manager and arts administrator, and James Norman Hiddleston, a scientist in physical chemistry who was the managing director of a pharmaceutical company. His father is from Greenock, Scotland and his mother from Suffolk, England. He is the middle child with two sisters, Sarah (oldest), a journalist in India, and Emma (youngest), is also an actor. He was raised in Wimbledon, in his early years, and later in Oxford. When Hiddleston was 13, he boarded at Eton College, at the same time that his parents were going through a divorce. "I think I started acting because I found being away at school while my parents were divorcing really distressing." He went on to act at The Dragon School in Oxford, then continued on to the University of Cambridge, where he earned a double first. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005.

Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) was a German silhouette animator and film director.

Lotte Reiniger was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, German Empire, on June 2, 1899. As a child, she was fascinated with the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, even building her own puppet theater so that she could put on shows for her family and friends.

As a teenager, Reiniger fell in love with cinema, first with the films of Georges Méliès for their special effects, then the films of actor and director Paul Wegener, known today for The Golem (1920). In 1915, the young woman attended a lecture by Wegener that focused on the fantastic possibilities of animation.

After a bit of persuasion, she convinced her parents to enroll her in the acting group Wegener belonged to, the Theater of Max Reinhardt. In an attempt to attract the attention of her distant and very-busy hero, she started making silhouette portraits of the various actors around her. This had its desired effect, and soon she was making elaborate title cards for Wegener's films, many of which featured silhouettes.

Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.

Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.