John Pilger believed passionately that great documentaries frighten the powerful, unnerve the compliant and expose the hypocritical. Across a long career, Pilger was called a ‘dangerous subversive’ for dissenting from the ‘official’ version of events. His work constantly asks us to think, question, speak out – and take action.Author Anthony Hayward (In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger) will present an illustrated career overview of the documentary filmmaker, journalist and author, who died last year. This will be followed by a panel discussion with special guests film director Ken Loach, Christopher Hird of Dartmouth Films, Richard Creasey, former head of documentaries at ATV and Central Independent Television and author and journalist Victoria Brittain, who will discuss the global influence of John Pilger’s work and his rich legacy.
About John Pilger
John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four-year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. ‘It was one of the strictest language courses I know,’ he said. ‘Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of clichés, that didn’t retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures.’
Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance ‘agency’ in Italy (with the grand title of ‘Interep’) and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.
He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.
His work in South East Asia produced an iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.
In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.
His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988), Welcome to Australia (1999) and Utopia (2013) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country’s ‘forgotten past’, especially its Indigenous past and present.
He won an American TV Academy Award, an Emmy, and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA for his documentaries, which also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society’s Best Documentary. The BFI includes his 1979 film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia among the ten most important documentaries of the twentieth century.
His articles appeared worldwide. In 2001, he curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World: John Pilger’s Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great black-and-white photographers he worked alongside. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Sophie Prize for ’30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights’. In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. He received honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and abroad. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work.
johnpilger.com
Victoria Brittain began working in 1968 in Washington, freelance for The Times and the New Statesman, then took herself to Vietnam, where she continued to work for The Times. She lived and worked in Algiers and Nairobi for seven years and became The Guardian correspondent. She worked for the paper for 25 years and became Associate Foreign Editor. She reported widely in Africa, and from Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Cuba and Grenada. She worked for many other media, including Le Monde Diplomatique, Afrique/Asie,Political Quarterly, and currently Afrique XX1. She also wrote books on the Cold War in Africa, notably Angola; the US ‘war on terror’, focusing on Guantanamo as co-author of Moazzam Begg’s Enemy Combatant, and Shadow Lives, the Forgotten Women of the war of Terror; most recently Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri on the Palestinian filmmaker’s work.
Richard Creasey was Central Television’s longest-serving programme controller. For 14 years, he ran the Factual Programme Department and was responsible for the company’s features and documentary output. During this time, Richard co-founded the Television Trust for Environment (TVE). He chaired TVE from 2002 to 2015 and is now an Emeritus Chair. Richard is a Life Member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Richard was also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Digital Village, formed by a group of leading thinkers and doers from the online, television, and literary worlds, including the late Douglas Adams. Richard’s first book, Eternity’s Sunrise, sprang from his determination to join the Crime Writer’s Association (CWA), founded by his father, John Creasey, who wrote 600 books following 742 rejections. Eternity’s Sunrise was published by Endeavour Press in 2007. Richard has published three more books and is now writing multimedia graphic novels.
Christopher Hird is the founder and managing director of Dartmouth Films (www.dartmouthfilms.com), which has pioneered new ways of funding, producing and distributing documentaries in the UK. A former investment analyst in the City, he worked as a journalist on the Economist, Daily Mail, New Statesman and Sunday Times, where he was the editor of Insight. He then became a TV reporter for Channel 4 and the BBC and co-founded one of the UK’s first independent production companies – Fulcrum TV – before starting Dartmouth Films, who produced and distributed the last four of John Pilger’s films – releasing them in cinemas before their transmission on ITV. He is a patron of the Grierson Trust, Index on Censorship and the London Film School and a trustee of the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Wincott Foundation.
Ken Loach was born in 1936 in Nuneaton. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School and went on to study law at St. Peter’s Hall, Oxford. After a brief spell in the theatre, Loach was recruited by the BBC in 1963 as a television director. This launched a long career directing films for television and the cinema, from Cathy Come Home and Kes in the sixties to Land and Freedom, Sweet Sixteen, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival 2006), Looking for Eric, The Angels’ Share and I, Daniel Blake (Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival 2016). If he’s not bothering people about their yawning or their chosen shade of off white paint, he’s likely on the Twerton Park terraces yelling at his beloved Bath City Football Club.
Host: Anthony Hayward is a journalist and author specialising in television and film. A regular contributor to The Guardian, he has written the books Phantom: Michael Crawford Unmasked, Julie Christie and Which Side Are You On?: Ken Loach and His Films. In 2013, he updated In the Name of Justice: The Television Reporting of John Pilger, originally published by Bloomsbury, as the e-book Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger, available through Amazon.
HIDDEN TRUTHS: JOHN PILGER AND THE POWER OF DOCUMENTARY
Seniors’ Free Talk: The Quiet Mutiny + intro and Q&A with author Anthony Hayward
Mon 28 Oct 11:45
Seniors’ Free Matinee: The Last Day + intro with author Anthony Hayward
Mon 28 Oct 14:00
The Pilger Effect
Mon 28 Oct 18:15
The War You Don’t See
Mon 28 Oct 20:35; Sat 16 Nov 18:10
Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy + Palestine Is Still the Issue
Sat 2 Nov 15:00
The Golden Dream La Jaula De Oro
Tue 5 Nov 20:45; Thu 14 Nov 18:10; Sun 24 Nov 15:30
Lousy Little Sixpence + Utopia
Sun 10 Nov 14:50
Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia + Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror
Mon 18 Nov 18:10
Burp! Pepsi v Coke in the Ice Cold War + Flying the Flag: Arming the World
Sat 23 Nov 17:45
The Coming War on China
Sat 23 Nov 20:10; Fri 29 Nov 18:15
The Ballymurphy Precedent
Tue 26 Nov 18:10 (+ intro by director Callum Macrae); Sat 30 Nov 12:20
The documentaries in this season contain distressing scenes of both violence and racism related to the events they cover
With thanks to
John Pilger, Jane Hill, Sam Pilger, Christopher Hird, Matt Hird, David Boardman, Marcus Prince
Programme texts compiled by John Pilger, Jane Hill, Sam Pilger, Christopher Hird, Matt Hird, David Boardman, Maggi Hurt and David Somerset
Selections from Hidden Truths can be found on BFI Player
For more information about John Pilger’s films go to johnpilger.com
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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