British Movie Rating Board Certifies 10-Hour Film of Paint Drying

A ten-hour British film made solely to bore the judges of the U.K.’s motion picture rating system may have achieved its goal: on Tuesday, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) gave their official certification to the picture. It received a “U,” or Universal, rating — the equivalent of G in the U.S.

The film is called Paint Drying, and features exactly and only that for 607 minutes, UPI reports. It is the work of director Charlie Lyne, who conceived the project as a statement against what he saw as the unfair clout of the BBFC in the U.K.’s film industry. On the Kickstarter page Lyne launched to fund the endeavor, he noted that British law prohibits cinemas from showing films that have not received a BBFC certificate.

“Luckily, there’s a flip side to all of this: while filmmakers are required to pay the BBFC to certify their work, the BBFC are also required to sit through whatever we pay them to watch,” he wrote.

The BBFC charges a submission fee of about $146 and an additional $10 for every minute of footage; Lyne grossed over $8,500 on his Kickstarter page, which allowed him to submit to the BBFC ten hours of footage.

BBFC examiners sat through the movie on Monday and issued the rating the following day. They classified it as a documentary.

[UPI]