John Saul Adrian Battsek (born September 1963) [1] is a British film producer of documentary films. In 2020, Battsek co-founded [2] production company Ventureland with producers Kerstin Emhoff, Ali Brown, and director Paul Hunter. [3]
He has produced [4] a number of feature documentaries, including One Day in September and Searching for Sugar Man, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. He also produced the Peabody Award-winning documentary film Bobi Wine: The People's President. [5]
Battsek is the son of Micha Battsek, a godson of Albert Einstein. He attended Highgate School until 1977. [6] [1] In 1999 he conceived and produced Academy Award winning One Day in September . [7]
He served as an executive producer on Academy Award-winning Searching For Sugar Man , Academy Award nominated Restrepo & Winter On Fire and BAFTA award-winning documentaries Hillsborough and The Imposter. [2]
In 2013 Battsek produced Greg Barker's Emmy Award-winning documentary Manhunt: The Search For Bin Laden. In 2016 Battsek produced Peabody Award-winning and BAFTA-nominated Listen to Me Marlon . In 2017 Battsek produced Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Music Film. In 2018 Battsek produced Emmy Award-winning documentary Forever Pure . [8]
Battsek was nominated for a PGA Award in 2010 and in 2011 for Sergio and The Tillman Story , respectively. He was also nominated in 2015 for The Green Prince. In 2013 he received the Grierson Trust Trustees' Award.
In 2019, he produced the AACTA Award-winning Australian feature-length documentary, The Australian Dream .
Under the Ventureland banner as Managing Director/Producer, John received an Academy Award nomination for the documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President. The film later received a Peabody Award at the 84th ceremony in June of 2024. [9] He also produced Emmy Award winners The Rescue and BECKHAM, BAFTA nominee Wham! , Sports Emmy winner The Deepest Breath , and Critics Choice nominee If These Walls Could Sing . He also served as a producer on the two-time Emmy-winning Rising Phoenix , and biopics Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker , Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In and Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story .
Frank Wilton Marshall is an American film producer and director. He often collaborates with his wife, film producer Kathleen Kennedy, with whom he founded the production company Amblin Entertainment, along with Steven Spielberg. In 1991, he founded, with Kennedy, The Kennedy/Marshall Company, a film production company. Since May 2012, with Kennedy taking on the role of President of Lucasfilm, Marshall has been Kennedy/Marshall's sole principal.
Nigel Sinclair, CBE is a Scottish producer of Hollywood films.
Ronald L. Nyswaner is an American screenwriter and film director. He is a Peabody Award winner, and has been nominated for numerous awards including an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Dan Jones is a British composer and sound designer working in film and theatre. He read music at the University of Oxford, studied contemporary music theatre at the Banff Centre for the Arts and studied electro-acoustic composition and programming at the Centro Ricerche Musicali in Rome. Having explored various means of generating music algorithmically, he is the author of one of the earliest pieces of software for generating fractal or self-similar music. He has won BAFTA and Ivor Novello Awards. He composed the score for the Peabody Award-winning documentary film Bobi Wine: The People's President.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968 and Yale University in 1973.
Paula S. Apsell is the television Executive Producer Emerita of PBS's NOVA and was director of the WGBH Science Unit.
Daniel Battsek is an English film producer and executive, and current director of Film4. Previously, he was president of Cohen Media Group, Miramax Films and National Geographic Films.
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John Smithson is a British film and television producer.
Anthony Wonke is a film director. He is an Emmy and triple BAFTA winning director and an Oscar nominated and Emmy winning executive producer. He has also won, amongst other awards, the Prix Italia, Peabody, Grierson and RTS for his films. Wonke is known for his original feature documentaries Ronaldo, Being AP, Fire in the Night and The Battle for Marjah as well as his documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities. Wonke's work ranges across a variety of genres always highlighted by intelligence, visual flair and emotional insight. His work has been shown at film festivals in the US, Canada, the Far East and the UK, as well as being televised on BBC 1, BBC 2, Channel 4 and HBO.
Connor Schell is an American film and television producer and the founder of the non-fiction production studio Words + Pictures. He is the co-creator with Bill Simmons and executive producer of the 30 for 30 series for ESPN. Schell was also an executive producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary film O.J.: Made in America and the Emmy Award-winning miniseries The Last Dance.
Marcel Mettelsiefen is a German documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and producer. His documentaries have earned him critical appraisal and recognition. Among others, he has won four BAFTA awards and four Emmy awards, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for Watani: My Homeland in the category of Best Documentary Short. In 2023, he won two BAFTA's for Children of the Taliban. In the same year, In Her Hands, was nominated for three Emmy awards, and won the award for Outstanding Politics & Government Documentary.
Forever Pure is a 2016 UK-Israel documentary film, by Maya Zinshtein. The film is directed by Maya Zinshtein, and produced by Geoff Arbourne and Maya Zinshtein, co-produced by Torstein Grude and Alan Maher, and executive produced by John Battsek and Nicole Stott. The film was released on Netflix on 6 July 2017 and went on to win a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 2018. The film was produced by Inside Out Films and Maya Films.
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Kerstin Emhoff is an American film producer and the co-founder and CEO of the commercial production company Prettybird and creative studio Ventureland. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Producers Guild of America, and Television Academy.
Jon Shenk is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film director and director of photography, known for his films Lead Me HomeAthlete A, An Inconvenient Sequel, Audrie & Daisy,The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan. He is the co-founder, with his wife Bonni Cohen, of Actual Films, a documentary film company based in San Francisco, CA. He co-directed and photographed Lead Me Home which premiered in 2021 at the Telluride Film Festival, was acquired by Netflix, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2022.
Michael Zimbalist is an American filmmaker. He is a three-time Emmy Award and a Peabody Awards winner.
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Bobi Wine: The People's President, previously titled Bobi Wine: Ghetto President, is a 2022 Ugandan-British-American documentary film written and directed by Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo. It chronicles the presidential campaign of popular Ugandian singer Bobi Wine against long-ruling regime leader Yoweri Museveni. The film won a Peabody Award at the 84th ceremony for "offering up a frank and urgent Portrait of an African artists driven to champion the power of the people in the face of a ruling class who'd rather silence him. It premiered out of competition at the 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival. At the 96th Academy Awards, it was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Film award.
Howard Gertler is an American film producer. He has produced narrative and documentary films including Shortbus (2006), World's Greatest Dad (2009), How to Survive a Plague (2012), How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017), Crip Camp (2020), and the Peabody Award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022). He has been nominated for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA.