One Day Films Blog

Having just returned from a trip to China – my first visit – I am struck by the sheer scale of the country. I visited mainly some of the biggest cities – Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong and when people talk of the booming economy, I now know what they mean, first hand. Concrete …

 ‘The Universe is made of stories, not atoms’. (Muriel Rukeyser) ‘Every picture tells a story’. So the saying goes. Whether it be Einstein telling a story in order to explain his theory of gravity, an African elder teaching children about the history of their people, Brazilian miners sitting in a bar reflecting on a day’s …

When I was about 11 years old, I started to learn to play the guitar. I had a music teacher who taught me something very important which has stayed with me ever since. I was at the time very keen to join a band and immediately wanted to play the electric guitar, so I asked …

The book, Creative Documentary: Theory and Practice, which I co-authored with Wilma de Jong and Jerry Rothwell has finally been published by Pearson Education through their imprint, Longman. This is a very comprehensive and thought-provoking book about the practice of making documentary films and I hope that anyone interested in making documentaries, or simply interested …

I was recently in Arles, southern France, where I went to the photography festival they host every year. This is a large and extensive festival and highly recommended. The settings for many of the exhibitions – and there were over 28 venues – were quite stunning and helped bring the photographs alive. Watching the many …

I was in London the other day doing research for my next film. Research for me means speaking to people, listening to their stories and digesting what they are going through and also, critically, imagining. I’m doing some preliminary work on a new film project with the working title of Flight. Flight is a feature length …

Many years ago, shortly after my father died, I remember seeing a pile of the clothes he was wearing when he passed away. They had been newly washed and neatly pressed. As you can probably imagine, the emotional impression was very strong. The empty clothes were pregnant with his presence; the person who was once …