Name Mark Linfield Spouse Vanessa Berlowitz | Role Writer | |
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Awards Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-fiction Series Nominations British Academy Television Award for Best Specialist Factual Movies Monkey Kingdom, Chimpanzee, Earth Similar People Alastair Fothergill, Vanessa Berlowitz, Don Hahn, David Attenborough, Harry Gregson‑Williams | ||
Monkey Kingdom Director Interview - Mark Linfield
Mark Linfield is a British writer, producer and director of nature documentaries for cinema and television. He is best known for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit as a producer of two episodes of the television series Planet Earth (2006) and as writer and co-director of the associated feature film Earth (2007).
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Career
After training as a zoologist, Mark Linfield began his career at the BBC in 1990, working on a documentary on gorillas in the Congo. The resulting film, "Journey to the Dark Heart", contained the first footage of western lowland gorillas in the wild.
He left to join the Bristol-based independent production company Green Umbrella, where his credits include "The Temple Troop" and "Orang-utans: The High Society", both shown as part of BBC Two's Natural World strand. The latter programme featured the first footage of wild orang-utans using tools. He also co-produced Triumph of Life, a series on evolution, which was screened on PBS in 2000.
He re-joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 2000 in order to continue working on high-end productions, beginning with David Attenborough's The Life of Mammals. This was followed by an award-winning documentary for Wildlife on One, "Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle". He joined Alastair Fothergill's team working on Planet Earth and took on responsibility for the episodes "From Pole to Pole" and "Seasonal Forests".
Linfield is currently working on two collaborations with Fothergill: The Frozen Planet, the follow-up series to Planet Earth, and Chimpanzee, a Disneynature feature film.
His wife, Vanessa Berlowitz, is also a producer at the Natural History Unit.