Life's lessons up on the big screen

Her production company has exploded from her house in Islington's chic Cross Street to new premises across the road. The paint is still wet and from the window you can see the playground of a primary school which is top of her list for a Film Club — the free, after-school cinema groups Kidron runs, aimed at expanding the horizons of children whose cultural education doesn't happen by lucky "osmosis" at home.

Since its creation five years ago Film Club has mushroomed. There are 677 in London, and more than 6,000 nationwide. Thanks to Kidron and her co-founder, film critic Lindsay Mackie, 183,000 children now watch a film a week — from Gandhi to Hotel Rwanda and To Sir with Love — 39 weeks a year. Kidron, who is probably Britain's most successful female film director, best known for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is passionate about the impact of her clubs. "Unless you are interested in something you can't learn," she says. "Boys come in who are like, Uh' and by the end of term they are writing reviews that get published in the bloody TES!"

At a time when arts organisations are fighting to justify their existence and future funding, Kidron makes a feisty advocate both for the film industry and for what it can do for communities. Film Club gets a uninterested class "warmed up," not just for education, education, education, but also for life. Watching films she says is about "giving them a bigger vocabulary, in literal terms, but emotionally, too".

The Department for Education has supported Film Club (as has the UK Film Council, of which Kidron was a director) but she would like to see it grow more, not just stand still.

Her forthcoming documentary for the BBC's Storyville series, Sex Death and the Gods, about young Indian girls known as the Devadasi, married to a god and sold into prostitution when they hit puberty, saw her scrambling on the floor of brothels and interrogating grandmothers keen to sell their granddaughters. After that I imagine Messrs Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt at the Culture Department are comparatively easy to deal with. She points out that although she "hasn't done the maths", Bridget Jones — she directed The Edge of Reason for Working Title — made around £300 million worldwide. "My education didn't cost anything like that," she jokes.

"The creative industries employ an enormous number of people and make an enormous amount of money. People like myself who went to film school and people who went to drama school and people who went to Cambridge to study English because they wanted to be writers, (like her screenwriter husband Lee Hall, whose working-class upbringing in Newcastle fed into his best-known film Billy Elliot), these people have earned hundreds of millions of pounds in their work, not for themselves, but in what they generate." Between them the Kidron-Hall household must have made an eye-boggling contribution.

But there are highs and lows when you work in the creative industry. Art is always a "high risk strategy," she says. A teenager wanting to be an actor "is every parent's nightmare" if the family is not wealthy. Still, she argues, "we have to allow people to go through that system. We need as a society to support that work. We need a Julie Walters every generation. We need a Helen Mirren. We need those people."

Education is also her answer to the problems she exposes in southern India. "It's kind of unsexy because it doesn't stop it now but by the
time of our grandchildren, their grandchildren too will be in a place of choice."

She believes the gap in attainment can be solved in the classroom, "but the gap in opportunity and in desire for achievement" has to be addressed elsewhere. She was, she claims "rubbish" at school. Excused from sport, she was allowed to study photography instead, going to work for war photographer Eve Arnold when she was only 16. The rest is one of British film's success stories.

Sex Death and the Gods is a difficult film but the audiences Film Club is determined to create should be up to the challenge. And I'd put money on there being a Film Club in that Islington school before the year is out.

Sex Death and the Gods is on BBC4 on January 24