The Birmingham-based film-maker Abdul Rahman remembers an event that he says sums up one of the biggest problems in the Midlands film industry. After a Q&A with a director, Rahman, who is known as AR Ugas, took a moment to survey the room.

“I was standing with my friends who are black film-makers, then on the other side were the more upper-class white people who had all the connections,” he said. “It’s those invisible lines that nobody wanted to cross.”

The Midlands is one of the most diverse areas in the UK but its film scene, which has grown rapidly in the last decade, does not necessarily reflect that. The disconnect came to light recently when Steve McQueen was shooting part of his BBC series Small Axe in a Wolverhampton suburb.

During the production, McQueen committed to having a diverse crew. He created a trainee scheme that placed black, Asian and minority ethnic talent in all departments; in London it had been a stretch at times but in the Midlands he found only drivers and one electrician. “The stark reality is that there is no infrastructure to support and hire BAME crew,” he said.

His comments followed a report into the impact of the British Film Institute (BFI) diversity standards introduced in 2014. It found that, between 2016 and 2019, no feature film made in the entire Midlands region that passed the diversity standards had any BAME representation in its workforce.

To put that in context, during the same period, 28% of films made in south-west England, which has a far lower BAME population, had some diverse representation, while Wales – one of the least diverse regions in the UK – recorded 33%.

The BFI points out the research covered only a handful of films, and that the Midlands does not have film production hubs like those in Bristol or Cardiff – although the Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, is opening a studio in Digbeth that is being called “Brummiewood”.

Even with those caveats, the question remains: why is an area that includes Birmingham, the youngest and most diverse city outside London, as well as Wolverhampton, Nottingham and Leicester, struggling to produce BAME off-screen talent?

The BFI chief executive, Ben Roberts, said the problem was that “people are either trained up and they’re not able to access the productions, or the infrastructure isn’t there at all”. But he added that the issue was also about a general lack of production work in the area.

“The idea that nothing is happening is not right,” he said. “The problem really is: if you’re a writer and you need to find a producer, where are the active producers in Birmingham? Because they also need to be developed.”

Roger Shannon, who founded the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop in 1979 before becoming the head of production at the BFI and UK Film Council, said the lack of representation was more surprising when the region’s film history was taken into consideration.

As well as the workshop, in Birmingham there was Stuart Hall’s academic work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and Michael Abbensetts’s Empire Road, starring Norman Beaton.

Shannon and others ask why the money the region has received in the past 20 years to build its film industry, which has grown by 50% since 2010, has not had a bigger impact on diversity.

In 2007, the region was given a landmark £4m film production fund followed by £3m in 2014 via Creative England, and another £2.1m in 2017, part of the West Midlands Production Fund.

Daniel Alexander and Ammo Talwar run the Back In programme, aimed at increasing diversity in film-making in Birmingham, but have not felt the impact of that money: Back In is self-funded.

Alexander said that in four years, they had developed 18 film-makers, including Rahman, who had gone into the TV and film industries. “The people are there, the skills are there,” said Talwar. “The opportunities are not flowing through, so there’s a problem.”

Alexander is a member of Create Central, an industry-led trade body that is trying to make things flow better and received £2m in funding with the aim of making the West Midlands a key creative region.

For Tenisha White, a Solihull-based film-maker, more needs to be done to cross the invisible lines Rahman encountered. “Whenever I shoot my films, most of my films are shot by people of colour,” she said. “I feel the industry does not make an effort to speak to people who can connect them to diverse voices.”

• This article was amended on 2 December 2020. In an earlier version, we said between 2016 and 2019, no film made in the entire Midlands region that passed the diversity standards had any BAME representation in its workforce. To clarify, we mean no feature film.