Comedian Barry Humphries explains his lifelong passion for the powerful and transgressive music and art of Germany and Austria after the First World War, and explores what happened to it under Hitler.

‘fascinating …a vivid account of what these artists meant to him, and their value to the world … A moving film’
The Independent

‘a tragic story given much humanity and humour’ Sunday Times

‘Humphries’ sheer force of personality and passion for his subject shine through’
Times

LINKS

• The Independent
• Daily Express
• Radio Times

The Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi is a global legend, as outspoken, hilarious and totally un-self-censored at 85 as she ever was, she remains a force of nature. Imagine… visits her at home in Cairo and travels with her to the village where she was born.

A writer of over 50 books and a winner of numerous international awards, she is famed as a pioneer in the fight against female genital mutilation, to which she herself was subjected. In this edition of the programme, she addresses some of the world’s biggest challenges in a surprising and personal way.

‘A timely object lesson in courage, defiance and grace under fire’
Guardian, Pick of the Day

‘fascinating film’ Daily Telegraph

‘a bold and engaging portrait of a remarkable woman’
Sunday Times, Pick of the Day

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• BBC Late Show

On the brink of the Depression in 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe – America’s first great modernist painter – headed west. In the bright light of the New Mexico desert, she forged an independent life and found the solitude she needed for her truly original art.

The photographs taken of her by her older lover scandalised the public. Her flower forms were seen as a shocking and vibrant display of femininity, her bones and skulls as surreal and disturbing.

Now, 30 years after her death, to coincide with a major Tate Modern show, imagine… tells the story of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the most inspiring artists ever.

Totally enjoyable … a wonderfully robust, positive and fulfilled portrait.Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

REVIEWS

• The Times
• Financial Times

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• BBC Culture Website

An intimate portrait of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison, dubbed ‘America’s first lady of literature’. Her books encompass the whole of black American history but live and breathe in the present.

Toni Morrison is now 85 – we filmed her at her New York apartment and her house on the Hudson River. We went back to the small town she comes from in Ohio, the setting for her first, brilliant book The Bluest Eye, a magical and painful tale of poverty and racism. We filmed her family home by the steelyards, the lakeshore where black people couldn’t go , ‘so it filled our dreams’, the old library where she found Tolstoy and Austen to complement her mother’s folktales and ghost stories. Nowadays the local school is named in her honour, and children all over America study her books.

Her best known novel is Beloved, which re-imagines the horrors of slavery perhaps better than any other artwork. Contributors include her friends Angela Davis (whose biography she edited in 1974) and the opera singer Jessye Norman, who went to the same black university, Howard.

‘An hour only skimmed the surface, but it was an hour filled with Morrison’s presence, prose and commentary … You could hardly ask for anything more.’Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

‘revealing, fascinating’Mail on Sunday

‘a warm and funny interviewee’Independent

‘uncovers a rich seam of the US black experience’Guardian

REVIEWS

• The Guardian
• Radio Times
• Crave Online

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

AWARDS

• International Art Film Festival, Tel Aviv 2016

BBC Imagine… enters the world of the most commercially successful, controversial and downright odd artist of our time.

Gigantic balloon dogs, rows of vacuum cleaners, the colourful, the commonplace, the shiny and ephemeral – American artist Jeff Koons makes ‘poor’ objects into something rich people desire.

His father ran THE interior design shop in York, Pennsylvania. As a child, Jeff sold gift-wrap and sweets door-to-door for pocket money. He went on to the radical Arts Institute in Chicago and explored the seamy side of life with artist Ed Paschke – ‘pop on acid’. Now he chalks up the highest prices ever recorded for modern art. Will his balloon dogs float above the art market bubble and hold their place in the history of art?

Contributions from Sharon Paschke, Lisa Wainwright, Damien Hirst, Hal Foster, William Feaver, Michael Craig-Martin

‘This Imagine was unexpectedly fascinating – I mean, Koons himself is both seductive and repulsive, dumb and clever. He embodies his own art …’Fisun Güner, The Arts Desk

‘Makes you question what lies below the shiny surface’The Telegraph

‘Keeps its tongue in its cheek, like, one suspects, its cheerful subject’Financial Times

AWARDS

• International Art Film Festival, Tel Aviv 2016
• International Festival of Films on Art, Montreal 2016 – In Competition
• Artecinema 2015 – Opening Gala

REVIEWS

• The Times
• Radio Times
• The Arts Desk
• The Spectator

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

On a train crossing from Switzerland to Germany, an old man was searched by customs officials. They found 9,000 euros in cash. Their suspicions started a journey back in time, to a hoard of art hidden since the Third Reich. It has reignited passions that seemed long spent. These were not old masters but new – works the Nazis labelled ‘degenerate’, like the Jews themselves. They tried to wipe out both.

Hildebrand Gurlitt, the father of the old man on the train, was a dealer for the Nazis, selling these works abroad and keeping some for himself.

In this two-part special, imagine… follows the extraordinary story of the Gurlitts, and those of the families who have been fighting to find their lost art.

“Jill Nicholls lays out the case against the German art establishment like a QC conducting a lethal cross examination – calm, forensic and utterly damning.”The Times

‘Riveting two parter examining one of the most extraordinary and explosive art stories of recent times’Daily Mail

“Leaves one seething with incredulous rage.”Financial Times

AWARDS

• Artecinema 2015 – Official Selection

REVIEWS

• The Telegraph
• The Arts Desk
• Radio Times

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• Looted Art

Judith Kerr, now in her 90s, is the creator of some of our best-loved children’s books, including Mog and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. She also has a gripping personal story – born into a Jewish family in Berlin, she was forced to flee Germany at the age of nine because her father, a well-known writer, was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. Her children’s novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit tells that story. It is now a set text in German schools.

We film children studying it at the very school she went to in Berlin, and see her at the local station, where she used to catch the train down town – it became the place of deportation for Berlin’s Jews. She looks at the memorial there with BBC Imagine presenter Alan Yentob – ‘It’s all very well’ she says, ‘but nobody did anythng’. She is a radiantly positive person – ‘we owe it to those who died – what wouldn’t they give to have just one day that we have?’

Contributors include Lauren Child, Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen.

‘A balance of shrewdness and innocence which takes it away from the realm of the dark or the twee … This is a beautifully straightforward documentary on a hugely likeable figure.’Claire Winter, Time Out

‘What a pleasure it was to look at the world through Kerr’s eyes for a little while …’Ellen E. Jones, The Independent

‘delightful edition of the arts strand’Daily Mail

‘deeply humane’The Times

REVIEWS

• Time Out
• The Independent
• The Times
• The Daily Mail
• Radio Times

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• BBC News

WINNER, ROYAL TELEVISION SOCIETY AWARD, 2013

This was the first film to tell the incredible story of the nanny who took thousands upon thousands of stunning pictures and never showed them in her lifetime. Vivian Maier has gone viral since her death in 2009. Disputes now rage over the ownership of her work – work that she kept secret.

She was both a tough street photographer and a poet of suburbia. In life she was a recluse, a hoarder, the ultimate outsider. The film tracks down people who knew her a little – she made sure that no one knew her well – and those who have revealed her astonishing work.

‘dark, revelatory, fascinating – highly recommended’Phil Harrison, Time Out

‘Touching, ambiguous and full of arresting images, Imagine’s film was a fine tribute to her.’Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

‘mesmerising’The Guardian

‘Astounding’Times

AWARDS

• Royal Television Society 2013 Award – Best Arts Film
• International Festival of Films on Art 2014 – Grand Prize
• Grierson Award 2014 – Nomination
• BANFF 2014 – Nomination
• International Art Film Festival, Tel Aviv 2014

REVIEWS

• Time Out
• The Independent

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• Wikipedia

Why do people turn to music when words are not enough: at funerals and weddings, at times of heartbreak and euphoria? Music seems to hold more emotion and to go deeper than words.

Small babies are filmed kicking and dancing to a rhythm – is it the beat of their mother’s heart that they recognise, the basic rhythm of walking? We see old people with Alzheimer’s brought forth from silence by the power of music. Wagner’s Rheingold, Laurie Anderson’s O Superman call up sound from the depths and heights.

The film weaves together a vicar, an adman and musicians as varied as Emeli Sande, Jessye Norman, dubstep’s Mala and modern classical composer George Benjamin to explain how music makes them feel and why they think it goes so deep.

‘captivating’Sunday Times

‘enjoyably wide-ranging’The Telegraph

‘superbly researched’The Observer

REVIEWS

• Radio Times
• The Arts Desk
• Metro

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

How does it feel to be on the run, to live in hiding and under a death sentence for a decade? The inside story of Salman Rushdie and the Fatwa, with intimate access to friends who sheltered him, family and bodyguards.

WINNER, GRIERSON AWARD, 2013

‘… a hugely insightful and occasionally thrilling examination of one man’s struggle, with lashings of dark humour.’Time Out

‘Excellent … captures not only the fraught global political climate of the times but the surreal quality of Rushdie’s twilight existence.’Telegraph

AWARDS

• Grierson Award 2013 for Best Arts Documentary
• Vermont International Film Festival 2013 – Official Selection
• Montreal International Festival of Films on Art 2013 – Opening Gala

REVIEWS

• Time Out
• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• New Statesman
• The Independent
• The Arts Desk

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• The Mirror

An observational film for BBC Imagine – a road trip round the desert state of Rajasthan, meeting traditional musicians whose existence is under threat in the new India. John Singh and the annual RIFF festival at the Maharajah’s fort in Jodhpur aim to help these usually low-caste musicians earn respect and a decent living in their villages, as well as putting them onto a national and an international stage.

We meet cross-dressers and dancers, Bhopa bards who recite four-night-long epics in front of huge hand-painted scrolls, saffron-clad, chillum-smoking sisters who rarely leave their courtyard – a revelation.

‘A joy of a programme!’Radio Times

‘… fascinating, the kind of thing I pay my licence fee for.’The Arts Desk

REVIEWS

• The Arts Desk
• The Guardian

For the first time since Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, Iraq has a presence at the prestigious Venice Biennale. We follow six Iraqi artists as they prepare their work for the show.

Thousands of years ago, Iraq was the cradle of civilization: Mesopotamia, the ‘land between two rivers’ – the Garden of Eden. Decades of despotism, destruction and despair have meant that Iraq and Art are not words normally heard together. But now, despite all the dangers and difficulties, art is re-emerging.

We filmed in Iraq, New York, Italy and London – all with male artists as no women were selected for this show. They included:

• Halim Al Karim who survived for three years in a hole in the desert, escaping conscription into the Iran Iraq war
• Adel Abidin who satirizes Saddam’s national hymns and America’s arrogance
• Walid Siti who paints the mountains of Kurdistan in his East London studio – when we visit Iraq, we see why: the mountain rears up right outside his family home; his father spent years hiding and fighting in those mountains.
• Ahmed Al Soudani whose visceral paintings of violence and chaos sell for six-figure sums in New York.

Their work is always imaginative, never just didactic. This was an epoch-making event in the history of a war-torn country, and the film opened a new window onto that world.

‘…lively, taut and informative’Howard Male, The Arts Desk

‘full of vitality and contrasts’Sunday Times

AWARDS

• Artecinema, Naples 2012 – Official selection

REVIEWS

• The New Statesman
• The Arts Desk

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

A very topical take on art and politics – big, bold, questioning and often surprisingly hilarious.

The National Museum of Egypt stands on Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the revolution was played out – the pharaonic past witnessing the turmoil of the present, as young people fought to forge a new future.

It is possibly the most precious museum in the world, with its dust-covered collection of thousands upon thousands of ancient antiquities. It was caught up in the revolution on the Square: its precious cargo was looted; young revolutionaries formed a cordon around it to protect it. More darkly, young revolutionaries were seized and taken into the museum by the army.

The film sees the current conflict through the lens of the museum, the lens of Egypt’s history. Omar Sharif, novelist Ahdaf Soueif and younger activists reflect on how Egypt’s past may influence its future – for the good.

‘inspiring’Time Out

AWARDS

• Grierson Award 2012 – Selected
• International Emmy – Selected

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• YouTube
• Radio Times
• IMDB

Pioneer photographer, forefather of cinema, showman, murderer – Eadweard Muybridge was a Victorian enigma. He was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, but did his most famous work in California – freezing time and starting it up again, so that for the first time people could see how a racing horse’s legs moved. He went on to animate the movements of naked ladies, wrestlers, athletes, elephants, cockatoos and his own naked body, projecting his images publicly with a machine he invented and astounding audiences worldwide with the first flickerings of cinema. Alan Yentob follows in Muybridge’s footsteps as he makes – and often changes – his name, and sets off to kill his young wife’s lover. With Andy Serkis as Muybridge.

“A treat. Did everything a good arts programme should.”The Guardian

AWARDS

• International Festival of Films on Art, Official Selection

REVIEWS

• The Guardian
• Cinephilia and Beyond

LINKS

• BBC Press
• Wikipedia

Looking life and death straight in the eye.

This film had enormous appeal not least because it makes old age unthreatening, even inviting. Now in her late 90s, Diana Athill lives in an old people’s home which she chose to go to and likes because the people there ‘have led such interesting lives’.

After a long career as an editor – for writers as distinguished as Jean Rhys and Margaret Atwood, Norman Mailer and VS Naipaul –she became a writer after the age at which most people retire. Her frank and entertaining memoirs reveal a string of love affairs, mainly with married, black and/or younger men – all the more intriguing given her privileged and apparently conventional childhood in a country mansion.

We film her revisiting both the mansion and her bracing Norfolk-coast boarding school, attending life drawing classes in London, looking back but also straight forward towards the inevitability of death.

“Beautifully and sensitively edited, one of the most clear-eyed, lively and non-infuriating Imagines in memory.”The Guardian

AWARDS

• Artecinema Naples 2012, Official Selection
• Arts Film Festival Montreal 2011, Official Selection

REVIEWS

• The Guardian

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Feature length documentary for BBC2 on the art, architecture, history and meaning of this dream city, sin city, a mirage in the desert.

Las Vegas is a film set in its own right, a piece of pop art, an outdoor museum of American culture. What is the story behind the neon lights and fantastical buildings? How was it first settled? What will its future be in these tough times?
Alan Yentob takes a mob tour and talks to producers and performers about the golden days when Sinatra and Dino held the stage, and the wise guys called the shots.

“… a terrific portrait of the place: part history,
part art history, part psychoanalysis.”The Guardian

“absorbing, surprising documentary”The Telegraph

REVIEWS

• The Telegraph
• The Independent
• The Scotsman
• The Guardian

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Landmark two part series exploring what happens to art in times of recession.

Part 1 – A New Deal for Art – looks back to America in the Great Depression, when art and artists were subsidised – contrasting that to American attitudes to arts funding today.

Part 2 – The Home Front – looks at Britain’s big moment for publicly funded art – again, a time of trouble, the Second World War – at the legacy of that outburst of optimism, and at how the current recession is affecting the art market and arts institutions now. Art dealer Kenny Schachter says that, in a perverse way, this recession is the best thing that has happened to the art world in ten years.

“Fascinating”The Times

“enjoyable, even moving”Financial Times

“A timely two-part exploration of how recession affects the arts …
a big weighty slice of history and argument wrapped up with some rather lovely images.”Andrea Mullaney, The Scotsman

REVIEWS

• The Scotsman

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Landmark three part series for BBC4 on the making and marketing of American folk music, from the recording boom of the 20s – Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dock Boggs – through the political folk movement of the 30s and 40s – Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger – to the huge 60s folk revival – Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Byrds. It’s the story of America in the twentieth century.

Read More

Intimate encounter with one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and influential novelists, Doris Lessing. 2007’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature, she is both ‘hostess’ and ‘alien’ – the hostess, who presents a public face to the world, and the private person who writes, dreams and ‘experiments with her life’.

Alan Yentob makes the tea in the kitchen of this unself-censored 88-year-old, whose ‘myth country’ is still the African bush where she was brought up. All her life she has been fighting her mother, about whom – as about everything – she is refreshingly frank. Feminism, communism, Sufism, science fiction – we hear her opinions and those of some she has influenced.

“Jill Nicholls crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist”The Independent

“Armed with a cup of tea and nothing to prove, Doris Lessing
addressed her past with a vivid wit.”Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“captivating”Time Out

” … a definite hit …”Telegraph

REVIEWS

• The Guardian

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Rare access to this disturbing, brilliant and witty artist – another unique and formidable older woman.

At 96 she was still working, still at the cutting edge, still confronting young artists every Sunday at the salon she held in her New York apartment.

Childhood memories produced fantastic and disturbing sculptures of giant spiders and poured-plastic body parts. As a girl, like all her family, she restored old tapestries, which surface in her art – she creates haunting rooms full of childhood fear and menace but also faded beauty.

Later she worked with Leger and knew surrealists like Breton and Duchamp. In New York she emerged as an artist in her own right, bringing dread, desire, sex and the psyche into her work.

We visit Louise Bourgeois’s salon, not long before she died, see some of her very last works and talk with Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Stella Vine and others who have been inspired by this strange, profound yet mischievous artist.

“fascinating film”Time Out

“impeccable”The Times

REVIEWS

• The Telegraph
• Sunday Express

LINKS

• Official BBC Website
• BBC Profile
• Tate Gallery Information Site

Loving portrait for BBC4 of the great Dinah Washington.

Tagged ‘Queen of the Blues’, she was both jazz and pop singer, perhaps most famous for lush ballads like What a Difference a Day Makes – and she was the first Queen of Bling.

Featuring an interview with Amy Winehouse.

‘ sublime portrait’ Guardian

‘Directed by Jill Nicholls, whose recent TV films include the portrait of Allen Toussaint, and Imagine: New Orleans after Katrina. Although Dinah died in 1963 at the age of 49, director Jill Nicholls and her team managed to track down a surprisingly large contingent of survivors who remember her well – two sisters, her son, one of her eight husbands, her pianist and bass player, all of whom help to give us a portrait of a tough, funny, tempestuous and unpredictable woman who was the prototype of the divas that Diana Ross and Mariah Carey were to become decades later.’
Charlie Gillett, Sound of the World

REVIEWS

• Jazz Wax

LINKS

• BBC Four, Official Website

Unique access to the very private man behind some of the best-loved songs of the twentieth century – New Orleans songwriter and producer, Allen Toussaint.

“purposeful intensity leaps off the screen”The Times

“a charming portrait of an ever-curious man”Time Out

AWARDS

• New Orleans Film Festival 2007 – Best Documentary Award and Grand Prize

REVIEWS

• New Orleans Online

As an official sequel to JM Barrie’s classic is published, this film considers why Peter Pan has such enduring, mythic power.

We go in search of the real JM Barrie, visiting the remote Scottish island of Eilean Shona where he climbed the hills with the boys who inspired his fiction, his very modest birthplace in Kirriemuir near Dundee, Black Lake in Surrey where he played with ‘his boys’ and Kensington Gardens, where Peter Pan was born, and never died. We talk to Diane Purkiss, author of Troublesome Things, about the meaning and power of Pan.

‘fascinating’ Observer

‘terrific first film in a new series of Imagine’Financial Times

‘a fascinating and provocative programme’Times

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Five of the great female voices of the twentieth century, who dive to the depths, in both their lives and their songs, yet whose voices triumph over tragedy.

An enormously popular BBC programme – Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin – what more could you want?

‘Engrossing’ Radio Times

‘a great documentary’ Observer

Links

• Official BBC2 Website
• IMDB

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the legendary bluesman Fats Domino was filmed by news-cameras on the roof of his house, surrounded by the deep, dark flood water.

That moment prompted this film, on the unique musical heritage of New Orleans – its soundtrack and influence – and also on how the city’s musicians were coping with the devastation.

At that raw and emotional time, straight after the hurricane, we went to the homes of Goddess of Soul Irma Thomas, influential singer Clarence Frogman Henry and jazz clarinetist Michael White. We met Dr John and Allen Toussaint, and traced the city’s history and the rich variety of musical forms pioneered and perfected there.

Jools Holland, Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello were among those to offer perspectives from this side of the Atlantic. Stunning observational filming of a jazz funeral and in the streets and the clubs of this resilient city.

‘Rewarding’ Observer

‘riff in praise of the city’s musical legacy to the world’ Time Out

AWARDS

• Finalist, Rose D’or, Best Arts Film, 2007

LINKS

• IMDB

One hour documentary for BBC1 about the golden age for women in country music – the 60s and 70s, when women’s role was up for grabs and these six women burst through with their songs from the battlefield of marriage.

Starring Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Bobbie Gentry, Tanya Tucker and Dolly Parton.

‘Commanding’ Guardian

‘fascinating’ Time Out

‘A wonderful surprise’ Standard

‘Thoroughly rewarding’ Sunday Times

LINKS

• Official BBC Website

Beautiful observational film following trainee dancers, their ambitions, eating disorders, disappointments and dreams.

For Network First, ITV.

An early exploration of mediation as a supplement to punishment – victims meet their assailants, with often unpredictable results – very moving, challenging and sometimes surprisingly hilarious.

Yorkshire Television for Network First.

Following a brave young woman who tries to break into a man’s world.
For First Tuesday, ITV

A mother takes her 12 year old daughter to Weight Watchers – birth of an obsession.

‘What do you want in life for your daughter?’
‘I want her to realise she has a weight problem and she’ll have it for the rest of her life.’

For Channel 4’s new directors’ strand, Short Stories.