VANESSA ENGLE
 

I am a freelance documentary filmmaker based in London.

For the first fifteen years of my career, I made arts documentaries, including four years (1989 - 1993) working for BBC2's late night arts magazine programme, The Late Show.  I subsequently made a single film about Ray Davies of the Kinks as well as films for the BBC’s Bookmark strand about authors Mervyn Peake and Charles Bukowski. My film about artist Sarah Lucas, Two Melons and a Stinking Fish (1996), was the first film on British television to be self-shot on DV. My three-part series Britart, about Britain's Young British Artists, was commissioned for the launch of BBC4 in 2002 and was followed by another three-part series Art & the 60s (2004), which had a tie-in exhibition at Tate Britain.  My film about Charles Saatchi launched the Imagine strand on BBC1 in 2003.

Since 2005, I have been making authored social affairs documentaries on a wide range of subjects, many of which explore our fundamental values and belief systems.  These films often have a personal starting point and this body of work includes five three-part series for BBC Television: Lefties (2006) about aspects of far Left politics in the 1970s and 80s, Jews (2008) about contemporary Anglo-Jewry, Women (2010) about three generations of feminism, Money (2011) exploring the impact of money on our daily lives and relationships, and Inside Harley Street (2015) about our attitudes to health.

I also directed the single films Walking with Dogs (2012), which examined the role dogs play in our emotional lives and Welcome to the World of Weight Loss (2013) about our obsession with what we eat.  My 2015 film, Love You to Death: A Year of Domestic Violence, chronicled all the women in Britain killed in one calendar year by their male partner or ex-partner.  My 2017 film The Cult Next Door told the story of a bizarre Maoist cult, which existed behind closed doors in South London for nearly 40 years. In 2018, The Funeral Murders revisited one of the most brutal chapters in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. For my feature-length film, The $50 Million Art Swindle (2019), I tracked down a rogue art dealer, Michel Cohen, who had gone on the run from New York in 2001. In 2020, The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech told the jaw-dropping story of a man who claimed to have been the victim of a high-profile paedophile ring.

I have been nominated eight times for Grierson Documentary Awards. The Funeral Murders was shortlisted for the Best Documentary award in the Broadcast Awards 2019. Love You to Death was nominated for the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards 2016 for Best Single Documentary.  Lefties won a Gold Plaque for Best Social/Political documentary at the Hugo Awards at the Chicago International Festival. In November 2015, I received the Outstanding Contribution to Documentary award at the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival.