The British Short Film entry to Cannes in 1964 is a sensual, sexy, surreal fantasy about a beautiful woman and her passion for peaches. The Peaches, a 15-minute story — which opens with a woman splayed on a bed rubbing her face with a ripe peach — is a mostly forgotten gem of Sixties cinema.

Directed by Michael Gill, one of the most brilliant cultural commandos responsible for the high end of 1960s British television, and written by Yvonne Gilan, then his wife, it stars Juliet Harmer as the Very Beautiful Girl, and is narrated by a fruity Peter Ustinov.

It also features a cameo from a very young, bespectacled A. A. Gill, son of the director and, now, restaurant and TV critic of The Sunday Times. See if you can spot him.

The film charts the coming of age of this clever and beautiful girl with the fruit fetish. In search of kindred spirits of like intellect, she goes to live in the city, but finds herself cleaning in the Ministry. Then — boom — she falls in love, and the peaches die as her love grows. But, in a stroke of luck and British wit, she transfers her craving to pickled onions.

The film won several awards and made Gill consider Hollywood. Happily, he chose to remain at the BBC, where he created the first adult educational art series and later approached Sir Kenneth Clark to make the brilliant television series Civilisation.

Now, in a newspaper first, in conjunction with the British Film Institute (bfi) which owns the rights to the film, Times readers can download this cult story. Download it or stream it at www.timesonline.co.uk/cannes.

That the film exists at all is thanks to the fact that it achieved funding in 1963 from the bfi’s Experimental Film Fund, invented by Sir Michael Balcon, maestro of Ealing Studios in its heyday. Now the fund provides a nest egg for cinematic rebels. It supports low-budget films, mostly directorial debuts. It was the success of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract in 1982 that got the bfi into the swing of funding and selling feature films.

The film is one of more than 230,000 fiction and non-fiction films and 675,000 television programmes held at the bfi National Film and Television Archive. Today, the bfi’s key priority is no longer production but the preservation and exhibition of the huge collections it holds in trust in the archive on behalf of the nation.

Providing access to the archive is becoming easier thanks to digital technology and it is through its DVD releases and web activities such as Screenonline (www.screenonline.org.uk) that the bfi seeks as diverse an audience as possible to enjoy our rich film heritage. As the download generation grows, so the bfi will develop new services to deliver films, information and stills online.

One of the biggest challenges it faces in providing access to the collections is that the bfi owns the rights to just a fraction of the material. The institute has no acquisitions budget, relying instead on donations of material for preservation and care.

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