People
Rachel Millward
CEO and Creative Director
BEV is led by Rachel, who co-founded Birds Eye View as a touring short film event in 2002, motivated by the statistic that fewer than 10% filmmakers are women. She has since led the organisation to become the high profile national arts charity it is today.
Rachel heads up company development and creative direction of all projects, including the artistic direction of our annual international film festival.
Rachel graduated in Theology from Oxford University in 1999 and then took postgraduate studies at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. Before focussing solely on Birds Eye View, she worked as a researcher for independent television & radio production companies.
Rachel has written for the New Statesman, the Financial Times Magazine and the Guardian on women in film, and on the media representation of people with disabilities. Rachel was nominated a "world changing woman" by the Guardian in August 2006 and a Media Award nominee at the 2010 Women of the Future Awards. She is also named as one of the 50 "Women to Watch" by 2010 by Arts Council England and Cultural Leadership Programme. Rachel is currently the film fellow on the Clore leadership programme.
Rachel is married and has one daughter, born on the opening day of the Birds Eye View Film Festival 2010.
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The Board
___________________________________________________________________Elizabeth Karlsen
Chair
Elizabeth Karlsen co-founded Number 9 Films with Stephen Woolley in 2002 after a long collaboration under the Palace Pictures and Scala Productions banners where she co-produced Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, nominated for six Academy Awards, and Mark Herman's Little Voice, which was nominated for six Golden Globe Awards, an Academy Award and six BAFTAs, including Best Picture.
At Number 9, her credits include Ladies In Lavender and Mrs. Harris, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005 and was nominated for a total of 12 Emmy, 3 Golden Globe Awards, 3 Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Producer's Guild of America Award. She was also the recipient of the Women's Image Network Award.
She and Stephen went on to produce Anand Tucker's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which was selected by Edinburgh, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals and nominated for 7 British Independent Film Awards; and the critically acclaimed, award-winning feature documentary Sounds Like Teen Spirit. Recent productions include Perrier's Bounty (March 2010, following its Toronto International Film Festival world premiere) and Made in Dagenham, a social comedy set during the 1968 Ford machinists strike (released in the UK by Paramount Pictures International in September 2010).
Forthcoming Number 9 productions include: an adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations; Dusty: Goddess of the Sixties, a decade in the life of British soul singer Dusty Springfield, an adaptation of Taichi Yamada's ghost novella Strangers; and The Lonely Doll.
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Lizzie Broadbent
Lizzie Broadbent brings international business experience from her work in investment management, business consultancy and marketing. She has particular experience in the areas of strategy development, operating model design, performance evaluation and operational effectiveness. She currently works for Shell, with global responsibility for Marketing Operations in Lubricants. She has always been an avid film-goer, reads widely about film and is a useful addition to any pub quiz team.
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Jacqueline Hurt
Jackie is a Partner in the Media, Communications and Technology Group at Olswang LLP. She specialises in the financing, production and distribution of films and television programmes with particular experience in film financing in connection with the structuring of co-productions with any combination of government subsidies, tax-based finance, distribution pre-sales and banking finance. Having acted for financiers and producers both in the UK and Europe, Jacqueline has knowledge of the legal and practical requirements of both.
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Geraldine Kelly
After a short stint in New York, Geraldine has spent the rest of her professional career in London working first for a U.S. investment bank and more recently for a major European financial institution in various positions. She is currently a Managing Director focussing on Credit Risk Management at ING Bank N.V. She has a keen interest in the arts including film, theatre and music, and joined the Board in 2008.
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Dr Sarah Rutherford
Dr Sarah Rutherford is a widely respected figure in the diversity field and has over ten years' experience of research and consultancy. She has worked with many of the leading organisations on their diversity strategies. She combines deep academic knowledge with hands-on practical experience.
Sarah has a strong business background, having been an investment analyst in an investment bank (Robert Fleming) and then a financial journalist on national publications (Sunday Times, London Standard). She was a non-executive director of bank Singer & Friedlander until its sale in 2005.
She has a M.Sc. in Sociology of Employment and Research Methods and a PhD in the Impact of Organisational Cultures on Women Managers, and is a Visiting Fellow of Cranfield University, School of Management. She has talked about diversity on various programmes on the radio (Nice Work, Women's Hour), and is experienced in talking about diversity issues at the highest level. She has been a guest speaker at numerous conferences on diversity. She has undertaken two years' training as a group analyst and is a skilled facilitator.