Working in partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), we organised an international tour of British films which have reimagined Shakespeare’s work. Our programme ambassador, Sir Ian McKellen, travelled to India, China and Russia to introduce the films at a series of popular public events.

I’m here as an actor to promote Shakespeare and as a long-standing friend of Russia and an openly gay man.

We held more than 900 screenings of the BFI film collection, attended by people in over 100 countries, including the residents of a refugee camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Shakespeare Lives short film collection

With films viewed over three million times, the collection reinterprets Shakespeare's most famous works while showcasing the diversity and breadth of the UK’s creative sector.

Dear Mister Shakespeare, one of the films in the collection, is written by Phoebe Boswell. In the film, Phoebe recites a rhetorical letter to Shakespeare on how racial tensions in Othello resonate today.

Another film in the collection, Star Cross'd, is poet and writer Laura Dockrill’s contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet, set on a British beach where ‘two houses, both alike in common crime’ wage an ice-cream war.