The BFI Lets Kids Pick Films About Kids, Calls It Rebellion

There's a specific move institutions make when they feel their authority slipping—they don't cede power, they redistribute the appearance of choice.

The BFI's "Rip It Up" season lets young people select films that reflect their actual lives rather than adult projections of teenage rebellion. The selected films apparently reject the stock character of the moody, hormonal teenager, showing complexity, flux, and real variation in how young people think and feel.

But here's the thing that never gets named: the institution chose which films were eligible for selection. The young people didn't walk into a library and say, "Fund this film nobody's heard of that actually matters to us"—they ranked existing work and curated a collection the BFI had already deemed worthy of preservation and circulation.

Once the young curators have done the emotional labor of selecting and writing about these films, they've also validated the BFI's existing collection as comprehensive. They've affirmed that the vault holds the right stuff and made it harder for anyone to argue that the BFI should be funding different voices, supporting different kinds of storytellers, or taking risks on work that doesn't fit existing categories. What would actually threaten the institution is if young people said: "We don't see ourselves in your archive—make different films, fund different directors, commission work you don't already control."

The question that breaks the whole frame is simple: which films made by young people, for young people, about their actual lives did the BFI greenlight after this exercise. Which new work got funded based on what they learned about what young people actually want to see? The season is an archive curation exercise dressed up as a listening tour—and listening without resources means the institution got to appear responsive without having to respond.

The BFI asks young people which films speak to them, then celebrates having listened—but the films were already in the vault, the season was already scheduled, and nothing about what gets funded next changed.