A Serbian Film and what banned means in Britain

A Serbian Film has carried an 18 certificate in Britain since October 2010, in a version four minutes and twelve seconds shorter than the one its director finished, and that missing footage is why people keep asking whether it is banned.

The cut version has been on sale in the United Kingdom ever since. What Britain refused was one particular print in one particular set of buildings, and the refusing was done by town halls, with no national authority involved that could reach every screen at once.

Nineteen days

A Serbian Film (2010) arrived at the British Board of Film Classification on 10 August 2010, submitted for home entertainment release. It was also booked into London FrightFest on 29 August. FrightFest normally plays unclassified films to an adults-only audience under an arrangement with Westminster Council, the licensing authority for the cinemas it uses. Rumours about this one were loud enough that Westminster broke the arrangement and required a certificate first.

That left nineteen days. The Board viewed the film for the first time on 13 August, with two Examiners and two Senior Examiners in the room, double the usual pair, and then ran it past its Head of Policy, its Director, its Vice Presidents and its President. A further screening was arranged so other Examiners could say what they thought. They did not agree with each other, which is the normal state of affairs on a film like this one.

Forty-nine cuts

The cuts list reached the distributor on 25 August: 49 individual cuts across 11 scenes, an estimated three minutes 48 seconds of material. Two things drove it. Scenes of sexual and sexualised violence, and scenes that set images of sex and sexual violence beside images of children.

The second is the harder line, and it has not moved since. The BBFC's published guidelines still name portrayals of children in a sexualised or abusive context among the cases where compulsory cuts are most likely. The filmmakers had been careful on set, had kept the young actors away from anything indecent, and offered to show the Board the dummy props used in the worst sequences. None of that changes what is on the screen, and what is on the screen is the only thing the guidelines measure.

The Board did try to cut around the argument. The film was built as a political allegory and needed to appal in order to make it, so the cuts were shaped to leave both the thesis and the sense of each individual scene standing. FrightFest decided it did not want a cut print regardless, and the screening was cancelled.

Four minutes and twelve seconds

A cut version went back to the Board on 21 October. Everything asked for had gone, and in a few places slightly more than had been asked for, because the continuity would not otherwise hold. The total removed came to four minutes and twelve seconds, 24 seconds more than the estimate. That version was classified 18 for video release on 28 October 2010.

The distributor had submitted the film for cinema in parallel, hoping a theatrical audience would buy a shorter list. It did not. The same concerns applied, the same cuts were required, the cut print was examined on 23 November and classified on 24 November 2010.

The town halls

Britain has no national film ban. Local authorities licence the cinemas in their area, and the licence carries the condition that admission follows the Board's age ratings. Within that, a council may impose its own restrictions, issue its own category, or refuse a film outright inside its boundary. The power runs both ways: a distributor can take a work the Board has refused to a council and ask for a local certificate, and councils have granted them.

Once Westminster had moved, other councils followed. A screening at a horror festival in Bournemouth in October was blocked. One uncut screening did happen, at Raindance in London that same month, and it happened because it was a private event with invited guests and no admission charged, which put it outside anything the council could act on. There has been no public commercial screening of the uncut version anywhere in the United Kingdom.

The rejection nobody issued

The Board's own machinery for the thing people mean by a ban is narrower than the word suggests. Cuts come first, as a condition of a certificate. Only as a last resort does it find a work unsuitable for classification as a whole, and its guidelines set that bar at a central concept it cannot fix by cutting, such as a sustained focus on rape or on sadistic violence.

A refusal at that level bites through the supply chain. Section 9 of the Video Recordings Act 1984 makes it an offence to supply, or offer to supply, a video recording of a work carrying no classification certificate, punishable on indictment by up to two years in prison or a fine or both. That is the real weight behind a rejection, and A Serbian Film never came near it. It was cut and it was passed.

The print nobody has shown

What Britain has, sixteen years on, is a legal 18-rated release four minutes and twelve seconds shorter than the film Srdjan Spasojevic finished, and a full version that has played to invited guests in one room in London and nowhere else. Anyone who wants to change that does not need to persuade the Board, which has already said what it wants removed. They need a council willing to licence the uncut print for a paying audience, and in sixteen years nobody has found one.