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Join award-winning director Geoffrey Smith (Presumed Guilty, The English Surgeon) as he explores the very heart of documentary directing across three highly interactive evening sessions.

DFG’s DocTalks series is a new strand of mini-masterclasses taking an in-depth look at the creative process of documentary filmmaking. Through a mixture of seminar discussion and case studies, Geoffrey will examine the key skills that are fundamental to contemporary documentary filmmaking, including:

• The Director/ Subject Relationship
• Storytelling and dramatic development
• Directing techniques and strategies

About Geoffrey Smith

Geoffrey was born in Melbourne, Australia and was always fascinated by the moving image. Never at ease in “the lucky country” however, he went travelling to find himself and discovered en route a love of listening and story telling.

In 1987 he found himself in Haiti helping to make a documentary about the first election there in 31 years, but following the discovery of a massacre of twenty one voters in a schoolyard, he was shot and wounded. Struggling to put his life back together in London, Geoffrey decided to film his journey back to Haiti to find the man who had so nearly killed him. This acclaimed film was subsequently shown on the BBC’s Video Diaries strand and was very powerful for the on screen catharsis it intimately portrayed.

Having discovered through this personal project that the camera could be a powerful tool in helping people through difficult periods in their lives, many of Geoffrey’s subsequent films are built around this use of the camera. Winner of numerous awards, director of the acclaimed feature documentary “The English Surgeon” and more recently “Presumed Guilty”, he has made over twenty two films and is drawn to observational real life dramas where deep ethical and moral dilemmas abound.

Other Masterclasses in this Doctalks Series

The Director/Subject Relationship

Directing Techniques and Strategies