Roger Graef in Conversation with Professor Conor Gearty

Contributor(s): Roger Graef, Professor Conor Gearty | This event celebrates the official opening of the new media studio at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The event will include BAFTA award winning film maker Roger Graef in conversation with Conor Gearty about his films, the impact they have had, and the challenges faced by film-makers today. Roger Graef is a criminologist and film-maker. Born in New York, he moved to Britain in 1962, where after nine years directing in the theatre, he moved to documentaries. He was a pioneer in the ‘fly on the wall’ school of unstaged observational films inside normally closed institutions such as the UN, the EU, the US Senate, British Steel, government ministries, multinational corporations, prisons, probation, hospitals, and care homes to make many award winning and ground-breaking documentaries. He is Founder and Chair of Films of Record. He has made films in the arts, current affairs, science, as well as making innumerable films in criminology – he is a Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Institute for Criminology at LSE. Graef became a UK citizen in 1995. He was Visiting Professor of Communication and Media at Oxford University, a founding board member of Channel 4 and a governor of the British Film Institute. In 2004 he was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship for Lifetime achievement, the only documentary maker to have received that accolade. He was awarded an OBE in the 2006 New Year's Honours list for services to broadcasting. In May, Bafta devoted an entire tribute evening to his fifty years in documentaries. Conor Gearty is Director of the Institute of Public Affairs and Professor of Human Rights Law in the Department of Law at LSE. Adrian Thomas is Director of Communications at LSE. The media studio is a facility for the production and post-production of digital video and audio, with capability for recording or broadcasting. The studio enables staff across the School to produce videos and podcasts of a high quality. It also enables academics to undertake interviews with broadcasters from around the world. Credits: Tom Sturdy (Audio Post-Production), LSE AV Services (Audio Recording).