Over 25 years Channel 4 has supported a unique strand of film-making - modestly budgeted, creatively inventive, socially progressive and with special resonance for British audiences. It has nurtured new writers and directors and given leading film-makers - including Danny Boyle, Shane Meadows and Michael Winterbottom - their big-screen breakthroughs. My Beautiful Laundrette, the low-budget feature that made director Stephen Frears' name, was a critical sensation for its fearless portrayal of race, class and sexuality in 1980s Britain. Frears went on to make more films for Channel 4 and is one of Britain's most distinguished directors. Film4 Productions works with the best of established and emerging British talent in full-length features and shorts: at the 2008 Orange British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) Shane Meadows' This is England won Best British Film and Dog Altogether, actor Paddy Considine's directorial debut, won Best Short Film. Channel 4-funded films have won five Oscars since 2005.

In 2007, director Kevin Macdonald - whose breakthrough film Touching the Void was made for Film4 - made his international reputation with The Last King of Scotland. This striking critical and box-office success took $45m worldwide and won three BAFTAs, and an Oscar for its leading actor. With a screenplay by Peter Morgan, Macdonald's film follows the trajectory of a fictional relationship between the charismatic Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) and an ambitious young Scottish medic (James McAvoy). In capturing the horror of Amin's murderous regime and the complicity of Uganda's former colonial masters, it combines a cracking story with moral depth. Like all the best Channel 4 films since 1982, it engages the brain as well as the emotions.