Stuart
Urban - Profile
Stuart Urban At the age of 13, Stuart Urban had his
first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The
Virus of War was a thirty-minute 16mm movie about
a fascist outpost on some British Islands in the Atlantic.
The cast and crew were all children and the film was
seen on television globally. It is now preserved in
the National Film Archive.
After
graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first
class degree in Modern History, Urban entered the
film industry in 1982 and has worked in various capacities
as writer, director and producer. His first full-length
BBC drama,
An
Ungentlemanly Act, dramatising
the first 36 hours of the Falklands War starring Ian
Richardson and Bob Peck, won a BAFTA Award as the
Best Single Drama and numerous other 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
movie Deadly
Voyage that won the Silver
Nymph Award for Best Screenplay at Monte Carlo.
In
1997, through his company Cyclops Vision, he wrote,
produced and directed the cult comedy
Preaching
to the Perverted, theatrically
released in 23 countries and a popular title on the
film festival circuit. In 1999, he produced, directed
and co-wrote with Harold Pinter Against the War, an
acclaimed and hard-hitting indictment of the NATO
bombing of Serbia for the BBC and Cyclops Vision.
From
2000-2001 he wrote, produced and directed
Revelation
a Cyclops Vision Production
for Romulus Films, sold internationally by the Overseas
Film Group. 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 $10 million and it
was theatrically released in UK April 2002, playing
for 5 weeks in the West End.
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 (< href="http://www.tovarisch.net">www.tovarisch.net) is his theatrical feature documentary about his father, Garri Urban, who survived and escaped from both the Holocaust and the Gulag and is participating with award-winning success on the festival circuit in 2007 after 15 years in the makin
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