"£5936 well spent": The censorship board classified the film "U": no material likely to offend of harm. Credit:Twitter: @Charlielyne Lyne revealed in the AMA that "to my great shame, I have not watched the film in its entirety". However, he says he is in talks with a London cinema about showing the film. Asked if the paint has dried by the end of the film, Lyne replied, "Would you ask Tolstoy how War and Peace ends?" The BBFC spokeswoman said the board classified the film as it would any other submission. All films are examined by a team of two examiners who write a report on the film, noting any classification issues raised and make a classification recommendation.

A hard drive with the film. Credit:Reddit A film cannot be released in Britain without a BBFC certificate, and Lyne believed that amounted to censorship, as the cost of about £1000 per film could be prohibitive for independent filmmakers. He was outraged by some of the body's censorship decisions, he said. He said a year ago he went to a BBFC open day in Soho, London and expected to see "quite a lot of conflict" between the film examiners and the filmmakers, but he was disappointed to find "nothing like that. Most of the filmmakers … seemed totally resigned to the censorship imposed by the board". "Obviously my little protest isn't going to singlehandedly eradicate film censorship in the UK, but I do think it can help combat one of the most powerful things that the BBFC has on its side: tradition.

"If this project encourages people to debate that status quo - whether they're with me or against me - I'll be happy." Lyne crowd-funded £5963 ($12,200) to pay the necessary BBFC fees, with each extra £7.09 over £101.50 adding another minute to the film's length. In an article he wrote for Vice last year, he admitted it was an "undeniably petty act of protest". "This project is the culmination of a decade spent aimlessly railing against the BBFC - a decade that began when I was 13 years old," he wrote. "Like every other 13-year-old I knew, [I was] convinced that the movie Fight Club represented the pinnacle of Western cultural achievement. One day, while poring through the trivia section on the film's IMDb page … I noticed another tab labelled 'alternate versions'. There, I discovered that the cut of the film I knew so well was in fact censored, with around six seconds removed by the BBFC to 'reduce the sense of sadistic pleasure in inflicting violence'.

"My mind was blown … if we censor art on the basis that someone somewhere might be hurt by it, we'll be left with no art at all. Should the [Beatles'] White Album be banned because Charlie Manson used Helter Skelter to justify murder? What about [J.D. Salinger's] Catcher in the Rye, which has at least three high-profile shootings to its name?" The BBFC spokeswoman said in a statement the board was "a non-profit organisation that works to protect children, from content which might raise harm risks and to empower the public, especially parents, to make informed viewing choices." Its guidelines changed to reflect changing social attitudes, she said, and the fees were needed to fund its services. "The BBFC respects the principle of adult free choice, but will still intervene where required by the law or where in our view there is a credible harm risk," she said.