Introducing the Anti-Racism Wellbeing Service for film, TV, and cinema workers

I am proud to introduce the Anti-Racism Wellbeing Service, a free, confidential space built specifically for Black and Global Majority professionals working behind the scenes in UK film, TV, and cinema.

This is an industry first, and worth celebrating. But it is also, I hope, only the beginning. Services like this should simply be part of how this industry cares for the people who make it what it is.

My name is Dr Anthony Newton. I am a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, and I have spent over a decade working across the NHS, occupational health, and private practice. I have also spent most of my life in the minority. As a Black, queer student, trainee, and psychologist, I have navigated institutions not built with me in mind, but it’s where my commitment to supporting and advocating for those who have felt minoritised comes from. 

My doctoral research explored what that experience does to people in quite a personal way. The negotiation you make, quietly, often unconsciously, between the will to survive and the knowledge that you have far more to offer than the space you have been given. And it is why the Anti-Racism Wellbeing Service needs to exist.

Drawing from Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist, a line has stayed with me…There is no neutral position on racism…you are either actively working to dismantle the systems that uphold it, or you are permitting them.

Anti-racism is not a feeling or an identity, but an ongoing practice and commitment. It requires a clear vision of the kind of world you would like to live in and the steps you need to take to get there, even when times get tough. 

The North Star for this role is simple: to reduce the impact of racism on Black and Global Majority professionals in this industry. The aim is to not make people better workers but to support them as whole people, in a system that may not always see them fully.

The Charity’s own research looking at anti-racism in the film and TV industry confirms what many already know from experience. Black and Global Majority professionals in this industry face disproportionate levels of racism, bullying, and harassment. And until now, there has been nowhere specifically for them to go.

Let’s face it, racism can be hard to talk about. Not just for those experiencing it. For everyone. There is a discomfort that settles around the word itself, a tendency to go quiet, to look away, to find another way to name what happened without quite naming it. That silence protects no one. And what we avoid tends to persist. Sometimes the most powerful thing is simply to say it out loud, in a space built to hold it.

It is an experience that lives in the body. A hyperawareness of being in the minority, and what that might mean for your safety. The feeling of being excluded from a room you are technically in. Not knowing how to make yourself belong in a space that should be for all creatives. The moment a comment lands and you are not sure whether to name it or let it go, and the cost either way.

Each of these experiences does not stand alone. They build on everything that came before. The exhaustion of translating what you carry for people who have never had to think about it. These are recognised responses to sustained exposure to harm. They deserve to be named, not minimised. 

And yet, most people do not reach out.

I understand why. Fear. Exhaustion. The quiet but persistent question of whether your experience is serious enough to warrant support. The instinct to push through, to not be seen as difficult, to protect a career in an industry where the networks are tight and the margins for people who look like you can feel even tighter. 

What we avoid, however, tends to persist.

This service is a confidential, one-to-one space to talk. There is no right or wrong and nothing is too small. It is not therapy. It is not a complaints process. There is no expectation that you will take any particular action. What I offer is a psychologically informed space to be heard, to make sense of your experience, and if it helps, to think through what your options might be.

Beyond the one-to-one work, this role is also about collaboration. Working alongside organisations, networks, and industry bodies to build understanding, share insight, and contribute to the kind of change that goes beyond any single conversation.

Individual support and systemic change are not separate ambitions. They inform each other. What I hear in the room shapes what I can say in the wider industry, always anonymised, always ethically held, but always in service of something larger than one person’s experience.

I want to say something about why I find this work meaningful, beyond the professional. I trained as a psychologist partly because I believe, as I believe about the arts, that both exist to make sense of the unexplainable.

A film that stays with you long after you have left the cinema, that you cannot quite put into words but know has shifted something. Or a therapy session that comes back to you days later, in a quiet moment, when you finally understand what it was really about.

Film and television have always held a particular power: the power to show people themselves, to tell stories that say you exist, you matter, your experience is real. The people who make those stories deserve the same.

This role will always be collaborative and intersectional. I believe marginalised communities are stronger together. But the specificity of this service matters. 

Anti-racism work must be allowed to do what it says, to hold space for Black and Global Majority professionals, to listen, and to walk alongside them in an industry that was not always built with them in mind. 

If any of this speaks to something you are carrying, I would be glad to hear from you.