Vanessa Engle

Vanessa Engle is a British documentary filmmaker who has been making films for BBC Television since 1988. For the first fifteen years of her career, she made arts documentaries, including spending four years (1989–1993) working for BBC2's late night arts magazine programme, The Late Show. Her 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. Her film about Charles Saatchi launched the 'Imagine' strand on BBC1 in 2003.

Since 2006, she has been making authored social affairs documentaries on a wide range of subjects, often interrogating people's fundamental values and belief systems. She is best known for her three-part series: 'Lefties' (2006) about aspects of the extreme Left of British politics in the 1970s and 80s, 'Jews' (2008) about contemporary Anglo-Jewry, 'Women' (2010) about three generations of feminism, 'Money' (2011) exploring our relationship to money and its impact on our lives and 'Inside Harley Street' (2015) about our attitude to health. She also directed the single films 'Walking with Dogs' (2012), revealing the role dogs play in our emotional lives and 'Welcome to the World of Weight Loss' (2013) about slimming. Eight of her projects have been shortlisted or nominated for Grierson Awards. Her 2015 film, 'Love You to Death: A Year of Domestic Violence', lists all the women in Britain killed in one calendar year by their male partner or ex-partner. It was nominated for the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards 2016 and shortlisted for the Grierson Award for Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme. Her 2017 film 'The Cult Next Door' told the story of a bizarre Maoist cult run by Aravindan Balakrishnan that existed in Brixton in South London for nearly 40 years. The film features interviews with two of the women who escaped from captivity in 2013 – Aisha Wahab, a Malaysian woman who had been with the sect since its inception and Katy Morgan-Davies, Balakrishnan's 30-year-old daughter, who had lived her entire life in captivity. In 2018, her documentary 'The Funeral Murders' on BBC Two revisited one of the most brutal chapters in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. 'The Funeral Murders' was shortlisted in the Best Single Documentary category in the 2018 Grierson awards and nominated in the Best Historical Documentary category. It was also shortlisted for the Best Documentary Award in the Broadcast Awards 2019.

In November 2015, Engle received an Outstanding Contribution to Documentary award at the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival.

Jews (2008), and Women (2010), have both been nominated for the Grierson Awards.^[1]

Selected filmography (director and producer)[]

• Croydon – A Late Show Special (1993)
• Georgia O'Keeffe – a Late Show Special (1993)
• Broken Lives (1994)
• Kristallnacht (1994)
• Bookmark – The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski (1995)
• I'm Not Like Everybody Else – The World of Ray Davies and the Kinks (1995)
• Two Melons and a Stinking Fish (1996)
• Bookmark – Mervyn Peake (1998)
• Stand Up with Alan Davies A three-part series (2000)
• Britart A three-part series (2002)
• Imagine: The Saatchi Phenomenon (2003)
• Art & the 60s A three-part series (2004)
• Lefties A three-part series (2006)
• Jews A three-part series (2008)
• Women A three-part series (2010)
• Money A three-part series (2011)
• Walking with Dogs (2012)
• Welcome to the World of Weight Loss (2013)
• Inside Harley Street A three-part series (2015)^[2]
• Love You To Death: A Year of Domestic Violence (2015)
• The Cult Next Door (2017)
• The Funeral Murders (2018)
• The $50 Million Art Swindle (2019)
• The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech (2020)

References[]