BROADCAST
Directors UK’s Anna Thomson seeks robust recruitment practices to tackle gender imbalance
Directors UK vice-chair Anna Thomson has called for more formal recruitment processes and unconscious bias training to help improve gender imbalance.
Thomson cited the casual nature of recruitment as a key reason why less than a quarter of television episodes are directed by women.
“The industry can be risk-averse. We need to open doors and connect people who don’t network together”
Anna Thomson, Directors UK
Speaking on the eve of Westminster Insight’s Gender Equality event, Thomson said it remains difficult for women to get into established professional networks.
“People often recruit through friends and recommendations. Often producers rely on the same 20 or so names they are familiar with. The industry can be risk-averse. We need to open doors and connect people who don’t usually network together.”
Thomson said Directors UK has previously held events for female directors, but the industry needs to hold more functions to help push female talent through, and introduce unconscious-bias training for senior execs.
She reiterated Directors UK chief executive Andrew Chowns’ recent call in Broadcast for the introduction of a more formal reference system.
Championing and celebrating female talent could also improve gender diversity in both TV and film, according to Thomson.
She named several films that she believes should have received more accolades, including Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider.
“Not enough female directors are being nominated or receiving awards,” said Thomson. “It is not just about getting women into these top positions but about keeping them there – we can start by celebrating their work.”
Thomson cited initiatives designed to help women break the glass ceiling, including the BBC’s Continuing Drama Director’s Training Scheme, on which directors are mentored on series including Doctors, EastEnders, Holby City and Casualty.
Directors UK is working with ITV Studios, Channel 4 and Creative Skillset on similar projects. However, despite the PSBs “saying the right things” about gender inequality, the BBC, ITV, C4 and Channel 5 all showed a decline in the proportion of episodes directed by women.
Of all the genres, factual showed the starkest fall in the number of episodes directed by women. Thomson said the near 10% drop was due to the rise in popularity of more hard-line factual docs and the rise of self-shooting directors, both of which skew male.
Comedy and drama were the only genres to buck the downwards trend.
https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/genres/call-to-end-informal-hiring/5138719.article
BROADCAST
A Greek Odyssey with Bettany Hughes, C5 11 June 2020
Series director Anna Thomson reveals the Herculean taks of exploring Ancient and modern Greece amid a pandemic.
It was a very fast turnaround commission. We had to take to the seas before the weather turned and winter set in.
Even though there were talented writers working on the scripts, as series director, coming immediately from another project, prep time was very tight.
But I took heart from having worked with DOP Tim Knight previously and knew there was no-one better than Bettany Hughes at making the ancient world come alive.
And as our hero, Odysseus, would agree the beauty of having a strong team who can think on their feet is that you can be agile in the face of the inevitable challenges and embrace the unexpected along the way.
Our first challenge was storytelling. There were several strands to weave into the series; Odysseus, Greek mythology and ancient Greek history, alongside more recent history and the magic of life on the islands. It was a balancing act that entailed developing different styles for each narrative element.
For the myths we used a gimbal, invoking the present tense for immediacy and crash-cut to dreamlike, abstract sequences relevant to the tales we were telling.
Modern Greece was captured on the fly, as our real journey was panning out, through spontaneous conversations with islanders, sniffing out local stories and filming them on the spot. The search effectively became part of our story as we skipped from one island to the next.
And we found that by capturing modern Greece, Ancient Greece came to life.
On each island, locals welcomed us with gifts, delicacies and potent alcoholic spirits – which, at 9.30am in the morning, we often had to turn down! It all harks back to the ancient Greek tradition of Xenia, where strangers are welcomed and made to feel important. In a world in which Zeus could stop by anytime disguised as a swan or shower of gold, it was considered prudent too.
Herculean effort
We retraced Odysseus’ route from Troy to Ithaca. It was a complicated voyage: 1,700 miles, exploring 22 historical sites across 13 different islands and peninsulas, aboard 27 vessels, from fishing boats to luxury yachts.
With more than 30 boxes of gear, just getting on and off each boat was a Herculean task. But these physical challenges helped us understand what it would have been like in the Age of Heroes, on little wooden boats, at the mercy of the elements and each day racing to reach land before night set in.
Our most frightening episode was the crossing from Ikaria to Mykonos. We started off in calm seas and daylight but before long it was dark and the sea had swollen, whipped up by the Meltemi wind.
We hung on, as our vessel was pitched at 45 degrees and six-metre-high waves washed up onto the deck. One-by-one, we all threw up as the waves drenched us in a swill of saltwater but still managed to capture some footage on our iPhones.
The ordeal lasted seven hours, eventually washing us up on the billionaires’ playground of Mykonos at midnight. Nothing had been set up for the following day, but we wove our terrifying journey into the story as Odysseus also faced punishing storms and ended up in a similar spot in dire need of some creature comforts.
Likewise, on Ithaca, a wake-up call that measured 5.0 on the Richter scale became an opportunity to explore the prevalence of earthquakes in Greece and how in ancient times, natural disasters were believed to be caused by the wrath of the Gods.
My tricks of the trade
Discover someone’s passion and capture it on camera.
Look after crew welfare. A happy crew is a productive crew.
Push visual boundaries.
Be curious, tenacious and humble – curious for stories, tenacious to get them and sweep the floor if it needs sweeping
But then there was the pandemic. A Greek word meaning “of all the people” it felt like ‘cancelled’. Suddenly, the Naxos carnival we were filming was one of many events called off. Thanks to local friends we found alternative small private parties we could film; sometimes when a scene falls through you come up with a better alternative.
And we were lucky. Ninety-five percent of our series was in the can. Now, it was simply a matter of devising ways of remote working to get all the programmes edited and delivered to Channel 5. Within days, edit producers and editors were provided with the rushes on drives and mobile edit suites necessary to work from their own homes. We worked off shared scripts on Google docs, each a kaleidoscope of colour-coded changes and revisions.
I supervised grades and sound dubs remotely and via a sanitized microphone, Bettany recorded commentary in a virtual home audio studio.
Despite all the challenges, and the last few months of living life on Zoom, perhaps it was because we had bonded so tightly that the films came together so well. https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/factual/a-greek-odyssey-with-bettany-hughes-c5/5150559.article
DAILY MAIL
Emotional moment 'unknown' WWI soldiers who lay undiscovered for over 100 years are finally given a proper burial on Long Lost Family - after DNA tests helped find their tearful relatives
THE SUN
HEARTBREAKING
Long Lost Family viewers break down in tears at heart-wrenching war veteran special
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/19244825/long-lost-family-war-veteran-special/
YOGHURT UTOPIA THE GUARDIAN
Cultivating a workers’ paradise
La Fageda is one of Spain’s most successful dairy farms. It’s also a co-operative which employs mentally ill people. Giles Tremlett meets its inspirational but ageing founder as his vulnerable workers wonder what will happen once he retires
YOGHURT UTOPIA How the Crowd is Kickstarting Our Film for Change
Yogurt Utopia: How the Crowd is Kickstarting Our Film for Change
By Pioneers for Change, Contributor
A worldwide network of talented individuals and global citizens who share a conviction, and have an idea or passion to create meaningful social change in the world.
Jun 22, 2016,
I'm a seasoned television director with over 30 art and history documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky Arts to my name. Over the years I've learnt how to manage the challenges that each new project inevitably throws up, but none have been greater than those of my current film, which is also the closest to my heart.
Yoghurt Utopia is a feature documentary about La Fageda, an extraordinary yoghurt making cooperative in a forest in Spain, started by Cristobal Colon, a psychiatrist over 30 years ago, where the workforce suffer from mental health issues.
Before they came to La Fageda they were locked up in an asylum, drugged up with no productive activities at all. Cristobal was their psychiatrist, but he believed that this was the wrong way to treat mental illness so he resigned. Amazingly he got permission to take a bus- load of patients with him and start a yoghurt business.
Now 35 years later, La Fageda is one of Catalunya's best-loved and most successful brands.
My fascination with the Fageda stretches back to its earliest days - many years before I became a filmmaker. My Catalan mother grew up barely a mile away from this pioneering business. I spent my summers in the same village and saw for myself local people's attitudes change towards the Cooperative - from suspicion to acceptance and finally to pride.
I passionately believe in the power of storytelling to influence human ideas. Yoghurt Utopia will reach a global audience and showcase the possibilities of social enterprise and therapeutic organizations as well as inspire change in attitudes towards mental health provision.
It hasn't been an easy journey. I knew that to give this story a chance I needed to spend an unprecedented amount of time at La Fageda and foster close relationships with the workforce.
As a freelancer, taking time away from paid work is daunting. Then I met the inspiring David Baksh, my life partner and a hugely talented cinematographer and director. We decided to take time out of our careers to produce the Yoghurt Utopia trailer - surely a commission would quickly follow?
But whilst a documentary about Hitler or celebrity desert - island would be quickly snapped up by a commissioner, mental health and responsible capitalism in a foreign language continues to be a tricky sell.
Despite this, very early on we were granted development funding from Robert Redford's prestigious Sundance Institute- the first steps on the long and windy road of making a feature documentary. Whilst TV films receive full funding before production, the average cinema documentary takes 5 years to make. However, David and I decided that this was too important a story to let go.
So in between paid work, over a two- year period we've filmed most of the film using our own resources. The fact that we've not had to adhere to a specific television programme format nor be tied into making money for a production company has been hugely liberating and in retrospect has enabled us to catch a truly unique insight into the lives of the workers at La Fageda.
But with any film there are costs. With great trepidation we took a deep breath and threw ourselves into a crowd-funding campaign: A leap into the unknown, which has been both hair raising and humbling.
We've realized that people all over the world, from mental health advocates in Turkey to film fans in China, social entrepreneurs and celebrities such as Michel Roux and Maureen Lipman want to see this film completed.
We've also learnt about the intrinsic democratic nature of crowd funding; where audiences are created, cultivated and empowered to not only choose the projects they want to see made, but also to become part of the making process. It certainly feels apt that our story of La Fageda community has only been possible through building a community of our own. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/yogurt-utopia-how-the-cro_b_10609490
TIME OUT
Michel Roux’s Patisserie
A feast for the eyes, with enough stunning creations to make your head spin, this absorbing documentary about the history of patisserie is also surprisingly in-depth. Michel Roux Jr, named after the patron saint of patissiers, proffers fact after fact about patisserie’s part in France’s social and political history, ultimately defining it as a culinary example of the democratisation of luxury.
In Paris, the amiable chef tries the exquisite macaroons of the ‘Dior of Desserts’ Pierre Hermé, traces the theatre of pastry to the first celebrity chef Carême, visits Lenôtre’s highly-regarded training school and gets lost in Conticini’s Pastry Shop of Dreams. In London, he visits William Curley, whose innovative creations are elevating desserts to new levels here in the UK.
Roux Jr is an ideal presenter: knowledgable, approachable, and with an insatiable passion for his subject. He remains fascinated by the artistry involved and stresses the intrinsic connection between food, emotion, memory and family. ‘Without patisserie, life would go on,’ he concludes. ‘But how would we celebrate it?’ https://www.timeout.com/london/tv-reviews/michel-rouxs-patisserie
A Great British Air Disaster, Channel 4, review
Philip Reynolds reviews A Great British Air Disaster, a Channel 4 documentary telling the story of the rise and fall of the De Havilland Comet - the world s first passenger jet airliner.