About Us
Cyclops Vision is a British film and television production company, founded in 1993 by Stuart Urban. It has produced three feature films and several documentaries. The most recent feature was theatrical documentary, Tovarisch I Am Not Dead (www.tovarisch.net), which had an award-winning tour of festivals worldwide before its UK arthouse release in May 2008, supported by the UK Film Council. Nominated for the British Independent Film Awards, shortlisted at the Griersons, and winner of numerous prizes at international film festivals.UK
In drama feature films, mystical thriller Revelation (2002, www.revelation-movie.com), was budgeted at €7.5 million. It was financed by Cyclops Vision, Romulus Films and First Look as a UK/France/Malta co-production and stars Terence Stamp and Udo Kier. Stuart Urban wrote, directed. He jointly produced with Jonathan Woolf. It was sold to 32 territories.
Cyclops Vision's first feature film was Preaching To The Perverted (1998), was developed with the European Script Fund and the BBC. It starred Guinevere Turner, Tom Bell, and Christien Anholt.The budget was €4 million and it was sold to 23 countries across the world for theatrical release. The film was produced, written and directed by Stuart Urban. Cyclops Vision. The flim has attained cult status worldwide and is still in distribution, recently licensing to pay TV in USA. The film spawned tribute clubs and a graphic novel.
In 1999 the company produced Counterblast - Against The War in association with the BBC. Written by Nobel prize-winner Harold Pinter and Stuart Urban, this was the first and only documentary during the war to resolutely attack Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia.
When not in production, Cyclops Vision focuses on developing drama and documentary projects for television and theatrical release
The business side of the company's operations is run by Alan Jay, its Chairman, who collaborated as executive producer on Revelation and Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead.
Stuart Urban - Profile
A film-maker since 1982, Stuart has made highly regarded, award winning popular TV drama and movies that have sold around the world, winning him two British Academy (and other) awards.
At 13, Stuart had his first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The Virus of War was a thirty-minute 16mm drama about a fascist outpost on some British Islands in the Atlantic. It is preserved in the National Film Archive.
After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in Modern History, Stuart worked as writer, director and producer. His first feature-length BBC drama, An Ungentlemanly Act, dramatising the first 36 hours of the Falklands War starring Ian Richardson and Bob Peck, won a BAFTA as Best Single Drama and many international awards.
From 1994-95, Urban directed Our Friends in the North, the most successful drama for 15 years on BBC2, which won him another BAFTA for Best Drama Serial. It was recently voted one of the Top 25 Television Programmes Of All Time in the influential British Film Institute Poll 2000.
In 1995, he wrote the $6 million HBO/BBC film Deadly Voyage that won the Silver Nymph for Best Screenplay at Monte Carlo and proved one of HBO�s most popular movies of the year. In 1997, through his company Cyclops Vision, he wrote, produced and directed cult comedy Preaching to the Perverted, theatrically released in 23 countries and a popular title on the film festival circuit. In 1999, Harold Pinter chose Stuart to co-write, produce and direct Against the War, an acclaimed and hard-hitting documentary attacking the NATO bombing of Serbia for the BBC and Cyclops Vision.
From 2000-2001 he co-produced, wrote and directed Revelation a Cyclops Vision Production for Romulus Films. This mystical/supernatural thriller stars Terence Stamp and Udo Kier and was shot in Europe and the Mediterranean. It concerns the quest to locate and understand a relic that heralds the fusion of science and religion. Budget is $7.5 million and it was theatrically released in UK April 2002, playing for 5 weeks in the West End. It has sold to 24 countries and Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard found it "excellent... a film with a brain behind it".
He has also directed extensively in factual television, most recently for BBC's Panorama where he did the influential 2005 edition Blair v Blair which covered civil liberties and terrorism.
Tovarisch I Am Not Dead (www.tovarisch.net) is his theatrical feature documentary about his father, Garri Urban, who survived and escaped from both the Holocaust and the Gulag. The film was released theatrically in the UK in 2008 and toured festivals with award-winning success, including a British Independent Film Award nomination and a short-listing for the Grierson Award, Britain's top documentary prize.
DOWNLOAD STUART URBAN'S PROFILE PDF
Alan Jay - Profile
Educated at Westminster School and University College Oxford. Degree in Engineering Science During this time produced and released feature film "Mouche".
After University spent two years studying accountancy before entering publishing, eventually editing and publishing a computer newsletter "Connectivity". Publishing for a small company led him to end up as Managing Director and act as financial controller producing annual accounts. Launched a niche Internet ISP (WinNET) in the early 1990's.
In 1994 founded the Internet Movie Database (www.IMDb.com) and took it from a text based database to a commercial Internet enterprise and top 50 internet site. From 1996 built an advertising sales team in the US and helped market and sell the IMDb to organizations including (Sony Pictures, Disney, Fox, Paramount, New Line, Warner Bros, Variety, Miramax, Centropolis, NBC, Universal, and in the UK - BAFTA, The Guardian, London Film Festival, Virgin, Capital Radio, NTL, BBC, Northcliffe Publishing, Flextech). Sold the company to Amazon.com in May 1998 in a headline-making deal and left the company in May 1999 to pursue other business opportunities.
Since 2000 Alan has worked with Stuart Urban to develop a number of film projects � executive producing Revelation - before joining him at Cyclops Vision Ltd and becoming a director of the company at the end of 2002. Since then Cyclops Vision has been developing a slate of projects and has produced the cinema documentary Tovarisch, I am Not Dead, completed 2006, alongside development of the twinned drama feature, Tovarisch.
In 2001 Alan set up Digital Spy Limited (www.digitalspy.co.uk), now the largest independent Entertainment news site in the UK and also runs one of the works larges forum based communities. Digital Spy reaches over 4 million unique visitors in the UK (Google Analytics) and serves over 80 million page impressions each month. Alan sold Digital Spy to Hachette UK part of the Lagadere group in March 2008 and continues to consult with the business.
Filmography
Tovarisch I am Not Dead (2007)
Revelation (2001)
Mouche (1982)
Rosa Russo - Profile
Rosa joined Cyclops Vision in 2007, bringing her immense experience in the Italian film industry.
She started her career as First A.D. and in 1991 she began producing 2 documentary TV series commissioned by RAI and after that produced many other documentaries and feature films for Imbarco per Citera and Thule. Among them "Una Storia d'Amore in Quattro Capitoli e Mezzo", "Non Con Un Bang", "La Vita Degli Altri" and "Capo Nord" which were selected and awarded in many international film festivals.
In 1995 she established the Centro Internazionale La Cometa, one of the most successful Italian School for Performing Arts. Responsible at Cyclops for distribution and marketing on Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead, feature documentary