Brian Edwards, born on 16 March 1963 in Lytham St Annes, is a BAFTA award-winning British documentary filmmaker and founder of the independent production company True Vision. Renowned for its focus on human rights and social justice, True Vision has become one of the United Kingdom’s leading producers of investigative and issue-based documentary films.
Edwards was educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences. His early career in television led him to establish his first independent production company in 1993, which in time developed into True Vision. Under his leadership, the company has earned widespread recognition for its commitment to exposing injustice and giving voice to marginalised communities, earning multiple awards for its work in factual and current affairs broadcasting.
This link and the red VISIT WEBSITE button below will take you to True Vision’s website where you can see the full list of films the company has produced.
Through his production company True Vision, Brian Edwards has earned numerous international honours for his work in documentary filmmaking. His films have been recognised with six US Emmy Awards, a BAFTA, two Peabody Awards, the Amnesty International Documentary Award, two One World Awards, and three Monte Carlo Television Festival Awards. True Vision’s documentaries have been commissioned by leading broadcasters including the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, and HBO, and have been broadcast globally, establishing the company as a significant voice in human rights and investigative filmmaking.
Among his most notable collaborations was his partnership with filmmakers Kate Blewett and Jezza Neumann. Edwards, Neumann, and Xoliswa Sithole received the Peabody Award for Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards. With Blewett, Edwards shared the Amnesty International UK Media Award for photojournalism in 2002 and co-produced a series of acclaimed BBC documentaries. These included The Dying Rooms, which exposed the neglect of abandoned children in Chinese state orphanages, and Kids Behind Bars, broadcast on 17 April 2005, which examined the lives of juvenile prisoners across different countries and explored the global challenges surrounding youth crime and justice.
Beyond his filmmaking, Edwards has contributed to humanitarian causes, serving as a founding trustee of the charity Care of China’s Orphaned and Abandoned (COCOA), established to support vulnerable children. He has also been involved in charitable theatre work, using creative expression as a means of advocacy and awareness. His career continues to reflect a lifelong commitment to documenting injustice and promoting compassion through storytelling.
Jezza Neumann, Xoliswa Sithole and Brian Woods with award for Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children at the 70th Annual Peabody Awards.
Brian Woods has continued to demonstrate the breadth of his documentary work through projects that extend beyond his established focus on human rights. Among these is Catching a Killer, a true crime documentary series that follows detectives from Thames Valley Police as they investigate real-life murder cases.
The series reflects Woods’s skill in applying documentary storytelling to a wide range of subjects while maintaining his trademark emphasis on authenticity and human experience. Through Catching a Killer, he offers viewers a detailed and unflinching insight into modern police work, combining investigative rigour with the empathy and narrative depth that have defined his wider body of work. You can watch it here on Channel Four’s website.
Text source: Wikipedia and Marli Wood'sBlogspot post
Images by © Peabody Awards
