Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Award-winning prison documentary maker presents at Leeds Beckett
Rex, who is best known for his BAFTA-winning prison documentary series Strangeways, will present his talk: ‘Human rights, does anyone care?’ in Broadcasting Place room AG02 on Thursday 19 November from 5-6.30pm.
Rex, who runs Rex Entertainment, producers of challenging documentaries, is a filmmaker who focuses on crime and punishment, human rights and the Holocaust. He has been one of the pioneers of the prison documentary genre in Britain, exposing the hidden realities of life behind bars with films such as Lifers and Living with Murder. His explorations on the Holocaust include Auschwitz and the Allies and ‘KZ’, an award-winning film described as ‘the first post-modern Holocaust documentary’.
Dr Steve Wright, Reader in the School of Social, Psychological & Communication Sciences at Leeds Beckett, said: “It is a rare privilege to have a documentary filmmaker of Rex Bloomstein's stature, to speak at our PAGE festival. For decades, Rex has been telling the inside stories on prisons and prisoners, such as his award-winning Strangeways film; making more documentaries on genocide and the Holocaust than anyone else; and persuading people engaged in unspeakable acts like torture, to tell him how they were groomed into state service.
“His BBC documentaries Human Rights Human Wrongs still inform our teaching at Leeds Beckett today. Less well known is Rex's role in helping to set up and fund the British Medical Foundation for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Torture, which continues its heart-breaking work of healing those who various states have tried to obliterate. His subtle work and insight speaks to many generations of those concerned about human rights and I do hope as many of us as possible will come to hear him tell his story.”
In his lecture, Rex will concentrate on excerpts from the various films and programmes he has made on human rights. These include: Traitors To Hitler, which graphically illustrates what happens when the rule of law is suborned to the State; the series The Roots of Evil which documents how a man becomes a torturer; and a discussion of the making of 11 years of human rights appeals and their impact with the BBC series Prisoners of Conscience, Urgent Action and Human Rights, Human Wrongs.
For a full list of Rex’s films, please visit Rex Entertainment.
The Festival of Applied Global Ethics 2015 takes place across the University’s City Campus from Monday 16 – Friday 20 November and is a week-long programme of talks, debates, workshops and films providing opportunities for discussion of key political issues and policy challenges facing our world.
The Festival is organised by the Politics & Applied Global Ethics (PAGE) group within the School of Social, Psychological and Communication Sciences. The programme reflects the main areas of work within PAGE: politics, international relations, global development and peace studies.