Stuart Urban
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Stuart Urban (born 1959) is a British film and television director. At the age of thirteen in 1972, he became the youngest director to have a film shown at the Cannes Film Festival with his short feature The Virus of War. The thirty-minute film was later shown on television in various countries.
He later attended Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with a first class degree in Modern History. He began writing and directing full-time in the early 1980s, working on television drama series such as Bergerac for the BBC. In 1992, his one-off television film An Ungentlemanly Act, a dramatisation of the first thirty-six hours of the Falklands War starring Ian Richardson and Bob Peck, was widely acclaimed. The production won the British Academy Television Award for Best Single Drama in 1993.
The same year, Urban set up his own independent production company, Cyclops Vision, which has produced the majority of his work ever since. He was also one of the directors of the acclaimed and award-winning 1996 BBC drama serial Our Friends in the North, although he left the production early after disagreements with writer Peter Flannery, and one of his episodes was entirely re-shot by another director, though not before being entirely re-written by Peter Flannery — a fact generally withheld from public knowledge at the time.
Urban went on to write, produce and direct feature films Preaching to the Perverted (1997) and Revelation (2001), both produced by Cyclops Vision and released around the world. His documentary film work includes the first polemical film against Western interventions, Against the War (BBC, Cyclops Vision; 1999) co-written with Harold Pinter, who also presented.
In 2006 Urban completed Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead, his long-gestating full length theatrical documentary about his father Garri, an escaper from both the Gulag and the Holocaust.
