Production team biographies
Rupert Murray - Director
Rupert Murray directed and edited Unknown White Male (2005), which was nominated for awards at the Directors Guild of America Awards, the Grierson Awards and the British Independent Film Awards.
The film tells the story of a man’s struggle in coming to terms with amnesia. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on Channel 4 and Court TV.
Murray has recently directed a feature length documentary Olly and Suzi: Two of a Mind, a film about two artists who paint dangerous predators in the wild.
Charles Clover - Author of The End of the Line
Charles Clover is a journalist and author, with a weekly column about environmental matters in the Sunday Times.
He was Environment Editor of The Daily Telegraph, based in London, from 1988-2008 and conceived the Telegraph Earth website and developed it with a small, talented team of other journalists.
He has been elected national journalist of the year by the British Environment and Media Awards three times, in 1989, 1994 and 1996.
He was co-author with the Prince of Wales of Highgrove: Portrait of an Estate, (1993) a best-selling study of Prince Charles's conversion to organic farming and gardening and a clarion call for sustainable farming.
His book The End of the Line: how over-fishing is changing the world and what we eat (Ebury 2004), has been described as the definitive book on over-fishing.
It won the Guild of Food Writers' Derek Cooper Award for investigative food writing, an Andre Simon award for food writing and the Zoological Society of London's BIOSIS award for communicating zoology.
So far it has been translated into Japanese, Dutch, German, Italian and French. The US edition was published in November 2006.
Claire Lewis - Producer
Claire Lewis is an award-winning film and tv producer; she has won two BAFTA nominations and six Royal Television Society awards as Executive Producer.
She produces the 7UP series with director Michael Apted, including 28UP (1984), 35UP (1991), 42UP (1998) and 49UP (2005), which was voted number one in the Channel 4 top 50 greatest documentaries of all time list and has gone on to inspire spin off series in Russia and the USA.
49UP, a TV and theatrical documentary was nominated for every documentary series award in 2006 winning the RTS award.
The Truck of Dreams (2005) produced by Lewis is a feature film about a young girl's dreaming of escaping her past. Set in India and funded by Bollywood, The Truck of Dreams won the World cinema award in Washington IDFF, 2006.
George Duffield - Producer
George Duffield has been producing feature films under the banner of Arcane Pictures for eight years. Credits include Dot the I (2003) starring Gael Garcia Bernal which premiered at Sundance 2003 and won the Deauville Audience Award, and MILK (1999).
In addition he has executive produced Tonight at Noon (2008), Black Box (2007) and associate produced Live Free or Die (2008).
He is also currently producing Olly and Suzi (2009 - directed by Rupert Murray) for BBC's Storyville and Journeyman (2009) (directed by Jamie Morgan). Upcoming projects include Matthew Parkhill's 60 Pairs of Calvin Klein's.
Christopher Hird - Executive Producer
Christopher Hird is one of the UK's most experienced producers of documentaries and factual television. He was one of the founders of Fulcrum Productions, which was in business for more than 20 years, making programmes for broadcasters on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 2008 he established Dartmouth Films, to build on his strong track record in independent documentary making and committed to documentaries which make a difference.
Hird was the executive producer of The Terror and the Truth (1997), a three part series dealing with the issues of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, won the European Union Humanitarian Award and was shown on BBC television.
He executive produced Belonging (2003), an independent feature length documentary chronicling the return of a Cambodian orphan to Cambodia 28 years later, which was nominated for the Grierson Best Theatrical Documentary Award.
More recently, he was executive producer of Black Gold (2006), the feature length documentary about the plight of the Ethiopian coffee farmers, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2006, and has been released theatrically in the USA and in the UK.
He was most recently executive producer of Pig Business, to be released in 2009.
Jess Search - Executive Producer and chief executive,
Channel Four BRITDOC Foundation
Jess Search is Chief Executive of the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation and the BritDoc festival - both organisations aim to ensure a creatively ambitious and diverse future for documentaries in the UK, by helping to fund, support, and facilitate the distribution of British documentary films.
Jess was previously commissioning editor for Independent Film and Video at Channel 4 for 5 years.
She commissioned award winning new talent, innovative and polemic, high impact films such as Adam Ant: The Madness of Prince Charmin, My Foetus, Alt TV, The Outside Zone, and The Texas Season.
She is the co-founder of Shooting People, the UK’s independent filmmakers’ community with over 30,000 members in the UK and 5,000 in New York.
Sandra Leeming - Line Producer
Sandra Leeming is a very experienced production manager having worked on a range of programming for British and international broadcasters over the past 15 years.
She has worked on a number of projects with Christopher Hird formerly at Fulcrum Productions and now at Dartmouth Films.
These projects include documentary, current affairs and factual entertainment programmes and have ranged greatly in size and budget.
Sandra has extensive experience in setting up international shoots, managing foreign crews and understanding the cultural issues and concerns involved with filming abroad.
She production managed Black Gold (2006) which won the Best Achievement in Production award at the British Independent Film Awards in 2007.
Jenny Williams - Researcher/Co-ordinator
Jenny Williams graduated with a BA in Television Production from Bournemouth University (media school of excellence) in 2006.
During her studies she worked on a number of documentaries for Meridian Television and was camera operator on a British Council documentary about polygamous families in rural Senegal.
Since then she has worked as a shooting researcher on a variety of documentaries.
Prior to finishing on The End of the Line Jenny worked as a researcher on Cameron's Money Men, part of the Channel 4 Dispatches strand. This film examined controversies surrounding some of the Conservative party's largest backers.
Claire Ferguson - Film Editor
Claire has edited award-winning documentaries including Nick Broomfield's Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (best documentary, Tribeca 2003) and Concert for George, which took home the Grammy for best music documentary in 2005.
Her background is in drama features, including work as an assistant editor on major productions by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam, Mike Leigh and Richard Attenborough.
Recently Claire has also been directing and editing documentaries on The Beatles for Apple Corps.
Chris Gorell Barnes - Executive Producer
Chris is a an expert in new media, technology and advertising. He is currently founder and CEO of Adjust Your Set and non executive director of Eagle Eye solutions.
Chris has worked in advertising for 15 years on both the agency and production side, producing award winning commercials all over the world.
He is a very keen fly fisherman.
Paula Nightingale - Assistant Producer
Paula Nightingale has been working on documentaries for the past 15 years, exploring subjects as diverse as voodoo, homelessness and sci-fi.
She has been responsible for researching and developing storylines, setting up and producing shoots on six continents (Antarctica being the exception), including the RTS award-winning 'Kumbh Mela' for Channel 4.
Since finishing this project, Paula has gone on to work on programmes about biblical history and prison life.
