In its 1991 Annual Report, the Scottish Film Production Fund (1982–97) trumpeted its institutional mission as being:

The quotation above is, of course, a fantasy which has beguiled the SFPF and its parent body, the Scottish Film Council (1934–97), since the Fund's inception in 1982. As, in these post-Marxist days, babies are being thrown out with the bathwater all over Europe, many indispensable concepts are being jettisoned. One such concept, that of uneven development, describes perfectly Scotland's relationship with diverse sectors of the UK economy, not least film production. To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third-world country, but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strings north of the border. There have always been signs that the SFPF and SFC were on a collision course with reality. One of the earliest officers of the Fund talked about discovering the next generation of Bill Forsyths and senior officers of the SFC, at their most delirious, have been heard to speak of ‘Hollywood on the Clyde’.

When the stated policy is compared with the reality of the Fund's most recent investment, Prague (Ian Sellar, 1992), the gulf is stark. Apart from the fact that producer Christopher Young, producer/director Ian Sellar and one of the principal actors, Alan Cumming, are Scots, Prague has nothing to do with Scotland and could not be remotely construed to fulfil what might be assumed to be a central impulse of a new national cinema – the exploration of the contradictions of the society from which it comes.

Individual filmmakers should not be blamed for using whatever production mechanisms are available to them, but the Scots involved in Prague were the fig leaf which allowed the project to absorb a massive proportion of the SFPF's available funds over an extended period and decorated the Europudding the film was to become. During the period when Prague was in development and production, the SFPF stood at about £250,000 per annum.