1:30pm Saturday 13th February 2010
By Neil D'Arcy-Jones
ONE of the country’s most highly regarded film-makers will be returning to Essex University next week.
Nick Broomfield, well known for such documentaries as Kurt and Courtney and the Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, will be at the Lakeside Theatre on Monday for a screening of his acclaimed first feature film, Ghosts.
After the film, he will be giving a talk about his harrowing work, which was inspired by the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers tragedy.
Nick received an honorary degree from Essex University in 2006, the first time he had been back to the campus since graduating in 1971.
The highly politicised activities of the time had a big influence on the budding film-maker and, as part of his political science degree, he asked to do a film about a close-knit working class community in Liverpool.
Born in 1948, Nick grew up in London and, after a stint living in California, he has been back living there for the last ten years.
After Essex and Who Cares?, he joined the National Film School at Beaconsfield, where he made Proud to Be British, in which people say what it means to them to be British.
It was his 1988 film, Driving Me Crazy, which first saw the style of film-making for which he is most famous – in which the making of the documentary is as much the subject of the film as the subject itself.
This approach was used to great effect in perhaps his finest work, the Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, in which Nick atempts to secure an interview with the South African neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche.
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