The Filmmaking Team

Paul Jenkins is an award-winning documentary director, specializing in political, historical and investigative films worldwide. Graduating in 1987 with a degree in Russian, Jenkins worked for three years on the Channel 4 current affairs series The World This Week before moving into the documentary genre. For the next four years, Jenkins produced with director Ed Harriman several Channel 4 ‘Dispatches’ investigations, notably one about the detention camps for Muslims in Bosnia in 1992 (A Town called Kozarac). In 1999 Jenkins produced with renowned director Leslie Woodhead the landmark BBC Storyville film about the Srebrenica massacre A Cry from the Grave. The following year, Jenkins directed Soldat, a feature-length documentary film about the lives and woes of Russian army conscripts for Channel 4’s ‘True Stories’ strand. In 2003 Jenkins directed an internationally funded (BBC, Arte) series Slaves of the Sword which profiled three generals-cum-politicians: Moshe Dayan, Yitzak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, examining their impact on Israel’s destiny. Also in 2003 Jenkins made a BBC Storyville/Arte feature documentary The Russian Newspaper Murders that graphically portrayed the hazards of investigative journalism in Russia – a theme he continued to follow with Murdering the Truth broadcast on Channel 4 in 2007, which investigated the murder of reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Jenkins has covered British politics and international terrorism for the BBC – making a series on Prime Minister Tony Blair and a three-part series on Al Qaeda in 2006. Since 2007 Jenkins has been resident in Paris, directing for the French-German public network Arte: the films so far have covered 1917 The Russian Revolution, life in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall (Que sont nos rêves devenus?) and an investigation into how the pharmaceutical industry are offloading clinical trials to the developing world (Body Hunters). His current film examines pre-war Japan through the story of warrior-monk General Ishiwara Kanji.