Patrons
Sir Alan Parker
Born 1944 in Islington, North London, Sir Alan Parker started out as a copywriter in advertising and went on to direct many award-winning commercials. Then, in 1974, he won a BAFTA award and the International Emmy with The Evacuees for the BBC. His first feature film Bugsy Malone earned him five BAFTA Awards. Midnight Express (1978) won a BAFTA award for Best Director and two Oscars (plus six nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture), as well as six Golden Globe awards. Birdy took the 1984 Grand Prix Du Jury at Cannes. In 1988 he was nominated for the Best Director Oscar with Mississippi Burning.
He has also directed a number of unique music films, including Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall, The Commitments (which won four BAFTAs in 1991) and Evita, which won the 1996 Best Film Golden Globe. In 2003, he directed Kate Winslet and Kevin Spacey in The Life of David Gale.
Sir Alan Parker founded and chaired the new UK government body for film, the UK Film Council, in 1999. He has also served as the Chairman of the British Film Institute and is a founding member of the Directors' Guild of Great Britain. He was knighted in 2002 for services to the British film industry.
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Tim Roth
At age 16 Tim Roth won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer after featuring in Stephen Frears's The Hit opposite Terence Stamp and John Hurt. He has since become one of the UK's most recognizable actors, first gaining fame in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.
In 1992 Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs paved the way to Hollywood, where Tim has since worked. He has since featured in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Woody Allen's musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You, Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth and is currently filming King Conqueror. He's also hitting the TV screens as the human lie detector Dr Cal Lightman in Lie to Me.
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Mike Leigh
Writer-director Mike Leigh was born in 1943 in Salford, Manchester and started his film career in the 1970s after graduating from the LFS.
He is the recipient of the Palme d'Or for Secrets and Lies and has been nominated for the Oscars a number of times, including for Topsy-Turvy, and in 2004 won the Golden Lion for Vera Drake,also voted Best British Independent Film at the British Independent Film Awards. His feature Happy-Go-Lucky was in competition at last year's Berlin Film Festival where Sally Hawkins was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress. The same film was also nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
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Nick Broomfield
Nick Broomfield shot his first documentary Who Cares, on slum clearance in Liverpool while at university. At the NFTS he met Joan Churchill, with whom he made several films, Juvenille Liaison, Tattooed Tears, Soldier Girls, Lily Tomlin, and more recently Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. They have a son together.
Nick was originally influenced by the observational style of Fred Wiseman, and Robert Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, before moving on, largely by accident, to the more idiosyncratic style for which he is better known. While making Driving Me Crazy, in 1988, a film hopelessly out of control, Nick decided to place both himself and the producer of the film in the story as a way of making sense of the event.
His recent output includes Ghosts (2006) and Battle for Haditha (2007), which won Best Director at the San Sebastian Film Festival. He has also been awarded the Hague Peace Prize and Amnesty International-DOEN Award.
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Samantha Morton
Hailed as one of the foremost actresses of her generation, Samantha Morton started her career as a young actress in television and theatre. She earned critical acclaim for Under The Skin and a few years later was cast in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown.
In 2002 she appeared in the award-winning Morvern Callar for which she won Best Actress at the British Independent Film Awards, and has since worked with Steven Spielberg and Michael Winterbottom. Her recent film The Daisy Chain featured in the 2008 Raindance Film Festival. She also featured in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York in the same year.
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John Irvin
John Irvin was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1940, and his career by directing a number of documentaries and television works, including the BBC adaptation of John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He made several action films in the 1980s including The Dogs of War (1980), Raw Deal (1986), Hamburger Hill (1987) and Next of Kin (1989). In the 1990s and 2000s, Irvin directed films such as Robin Hood (1991), When Trumpets Fade (1998), Shiner (2000), The Moon and the Stars (2007) and most recently The Garden of Eden (2008), an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel. He is now working on Red Gold, a film about Italian prisoners of war in the USA in 1943.
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Michael Caton-Jones
Michael Caton-Jones graduated as a director from the National Film and Television School and hit the international film industry's radar in 1989 with his first feature Scandal, based on the notorious Profumo affair in 1960s Britain. This was followed by a raft of critically-acclaimed projects including Rob Roy, Memphis Belle, Doc Hollywood, This Boy's Life and City By the Sea.
One of Caton-Jones' most recent releases was the award-winning Shooting Dogs. This film, shot entirely on location in Rwanda and starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy, is based on the true story of a Catholic priest and an idealistic young English teacher caught up in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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Terence Davies
Terence Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945 and attended a series of Catholic schools. His harsh childhood experiences form the basis of much of his output.
His first works were all autobiographical, starting with the short films Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983) (which together comprise his Trilogy) and the full-length features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). His next two films, The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000), were adaptations of novels by John Kennedy Toole and Edith Wharton, respectively.
His most recent released film is Of Time and the City (2008), his documentary about Liverpool. His latest work, The Deep Blue Sea, an adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, is due to be released in the UK in November 2011. He has also adapted and directed several novels for radio, most recently Virginia Woolf's The Waves for BBC Radio 4.
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Faye Dunaway
For 30 years Faye Dunaway has been described as one of the greatest actresses in history. She started on Broadway, but her film career launched after appearing as lead opposite Warren Beatty in Bonnie And Clyde in 1967. She starred in The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen and later Roman Polanski's Chinatown, helping define an era in one of Hollywood's greatest times.
Faye has won three Golden Globes and one Oscar for Network, and in 2006 agreed to feature in the Welsh low budget indie Flick as the one-armed policewoman. In 2008 she hosted a charity fundraising dinner for the IFT following the world premiere of Flick.
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Bill Forsyth
Bill Forsyth got his first job aged seventeen in Glasgow,responding to an ad in the local newspaper that stated "Lad Required for Film Production Company". He quickly developed a taste for avant-garde cinema, making his own austere experimental films. At the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1970 he managed to empty the cinema of its entire audience during the screening of his film (All Trains Go To) Waterloo. He hasn't managed to move an audience in quite the same way since.
Nine years later at the same festival Forsyth's first feature film That Sinking Feeling launched his career and gained him a reputation for writing/directing some of the best-known films of the '80s.
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Kurt Hoffman
Kurt Hoffman, a US citizen but permanent resident of the UK, is an industrial economist and serial entre/intrapreneur, with a track record of launching and scaling start-ups, building institutions and leading change within them, in the private, international-public and civil society sectors.
He is managing director of Lion's Head Global Partners, an investment advisory firm specialising in creating sustainable value by commercial investments in market-based solutions to poverty and environmental challenges, and for the Hewlett Foundation, director/architect of the public-private TransFarm Africa, which channels finance and technical assistance in commercial sustainable and equitable transformation of small-scale subsistence agriculture in Africa.
He set up the Shell Foundation and was its director until October 2008.
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Sean McCartney
Sean McCartney is Professor of Accounting and Business History at Queen Mary, University of London. His main interests are in British industrial performance in the 19th century and particularly in the development of the railways. In 2004 he published a major biography of George Hudson, famous (or infamous) as the 'Railway King' of the 1840s and also as the first entrepreneur who could be properly described as a celebrity, whose activities were obsessively chronicled in the contemporary press.
Sean is mainly interested in the financial side of film-making and is a director of McCartney Media Limited, whose first film, the Anglo-Russian production The Season of Mists, received its premiere at the Kinotavr film festival in Sochi in June 2008 and was released in March 2009.
