Sheila Hayman (born 1956) is a British documentary filmmaker, journalist and novelist.
Sheila Hayman was born in 1956, one of three daughters of Walter Hayman and Margaret Hayman, who together founded the British Mathematical Olympiad. She is a descendant of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn. [1] Her older sister is Carolyn Hayman, cofounder of Peace Direct. She was educated at Putney High School and Newnham College, Cambridge. [2]
Hayman joined the Science department of the BBC, and later worked with Channel 4. [3] In 1990 she was awarded a BAFTA Fulbright Fellowship in film and television by the Fulbright Commission. [4] She moved to Los Angeles to learn screenwriting. In California she encountered the early internet, about which she made the BBC documentary The Electronic Frontier. [3]
Hayman's film Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me (2009) wove together the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with the experience of her family and other Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany. [5] The documentary was nominated for the Grierson Arts Documentary of the Year in 2010. [6]
In 2016 Hayman was appointed a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. [7] At MIT she began a documentary project, Senseless, on the difference between machine and human intelligence. [8] In 2020 she was Artist in Residence at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. [9] The residency led to a short film, Complexity, with music by Cosmo Sheldrake, on the challenges of reducing the natural world's complexity to computer models. [10]
Hayman's 2023 documentary Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn told the story of her great-great-great-grandmother, the composer Fanny Mendelssohn, and the rediscovery of her lost Easter Sonata . [11] [12] [13]
Hayman is married to the TV producer and writer Patrick Uden. [14] She serves on the advisory board of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. [15] She has a long-term job at Freedom from Torture, [16] where she coordinates a creative writing group for torture survivors, 'Write to Life'. She has also written three comic novels. [3]
A documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". The American author and media analyst Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
John Grierson was a Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert J. Flaherty's Moana. In 1939, Grierson established the all-time Canadian film institutional production and distribution company The National Film Board of Canada controlled by the Government of Canada.
Fanny Mendelssohn was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who was known as Fanny Hensel after her marriage. Her compositions include a string quartet, a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, more than 125 pieces for the piano and over 250 lieder, most of which were unpublished in her lifetime. Although lauded for her piano technique, she rarely gave public performances outside her family circle.
Arnold Fanck was a German film director and pioneer of the mountain film genre. He is best known for the extraordinary alpine footage he captured in such films as The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930), The White Ecstasy (1931), and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). Fanck was also instrumental in launching the careers of several filmmakers during the Weimar years in Germany, including Leni Riefenstahl, Luis Trenker, and cinematographers Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst, Hans Schneeberger, and Walter Riml.
The Moscow International Film Festival is a film festival first held in Moscow in 1935 and became regular since 1959. From its inception to 1959, it was held every second year in July, alternating with the Karlovy Vary festival. The festival has been held annually since 1999. In reaction to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the FIAPF paused the accreditation of the festival until further notice.
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an American jazz singer and actress. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio's syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.
David Hayman is a British film, television and stage actor and director from Glasgow, Scotland. His acting credits include Sid and Nancy (1986), Hope and Glory (1987), Rob Roy (1995), The Jackal (1997), Trial & Retribution (1997-2009), Legionnaire (1998), Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000), Vertical Limit (2000), The Tailor of Panama (2001), Flood (2007), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), The Paradise (2012), Taboo (2017), Our Ladies (2019), The Nest (2020), Bull (2021), and Andor (2022).
The BFI London Film Festival is an annual film festival held in London, England, in collaboration with the British Film Institute. The festival runs for two weeks every October. In 2016, the BFI estimated that around 240 feature films and 150 short films from more than 70 countries are screened at the festival each year.
Grierson: The British Documentary Awards, commonly known as The Grierson Awards, are awards bestowed by The Grierson Trust to recognise innovative and exciting documentary films, in honour of the pioneering Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson.
Anna Beer is a British author and lecturer, primarily known for her work as a biographer.
Norma Percy is an American-born, documentary film maker and producer. The documentaries she has produced in collaboration with Brian Lapping have covered many of the crises of the 20th Century. In 2010, she was awarded the Orwell Prize Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
Hilde von Stolz was an Austrian-German actress.
Walter Kurt Hayman FRS was a British mathematician known for contributions to complex analysis. He was a professor at Imperial College London.
Beena Sarwar is a Pakistani journalist, artist and filmmaker focusing on human rights, media and peace.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an American historian. She is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, author of two books on Korea, co-editor of a third book on Asian nations in the post-Cold War era, and a forthcoming book on great power competition in northeast Asia at the turn of the 19th-20th century. She is a well-known historian of Korea and East Asia.
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist formerly based at the MIT Media Lab. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence (AI).
Heart Valley is a 2022 short documentary film about Welsh shepherd Wilf Davies. Directed and produced by filmmaker Christian Cargill, the film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 9, 2022 where it won the award for Best Documentary Short. It first broadcast in the UK on BBC Two Wales and BBC iPlayer on July 26, 2022 and released online with The New Yorker on December 2, 2022. The documentary won the BAFTA Cymru Award 2023 for Short Film and was nominated for The Grierson Award 2023 for Best Documentary Short. The Hollywood Reporter named Heart Valley as one of their Top 23 Short Documentaries of 2022 and it was one of 98 films to qualify for the 95th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short.
Jill Nicholls is a British filmmaker, best known for her art documentaries on television. Her films over the decades have frequently featured the lives of high-profile figures, including Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Diana Athill, Judith Kerr, Salman Rushdie, Vivian Maier, Louise Bourgeois and Tom Stoppard. Nicholls has won several awards for her films, including from the Royal Television Society, the Grierson Trust and the New Orleans Film Festival. Also a journalist, she worked in the 1970s for women's liberation magazine Spare Rib, as well writing for other publications.
Merlin Sheldrake is a British mycologist and writer known for his work on mycorrhiza.