Name Paul Yule Role Film-maker | Spouse Denise Dorrance | |
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Movies Damned in the U.S.A., Elgar's Tenth Muse: The Life of an English Composer Similar People Denise Dorrance, Jimmy Tingle, Faith Brook, James Fox, Natalie Clein | ||
Paul Harris Yule (born 1956) is a photojournalist and film maker. In addition to his photography, he has directed more than 30 films on six continents, often on controversial political and social themes, several of which have won major awards, including an International Emmy (for Damned In The USA - Berwick Universal Pictures, 1990), awards from the Royal Television Society, an Edward Morrow Prize, and an Amnesty International Prize. He founded the production company Berwick Universal Pictures in London in 1980.
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Life and work
Paul Yule was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and his family emigrated to England when he was eight years old. He went to Aldenham School and then studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University.
His first outlet for photojournalism was working for the university magazine Isis, and documenting the early theatre work of contemporaries Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of that generation. After leaving Oxford Yule founded Berwick Universal Pictures with photographer Chris Plytas, working from a basement studio in Berwick Street, London. In 1980 he did the cover photography for Rowan Atkinson's Live in Belfast album. In 1983, following several visits to Peru, his book The New Incas (with an introduction by John Hemming) was published by The New Pyramid Press and the photographs were exhibited widely, including at The Side Gallery, Newcastle and The Royal Geographical Society.
Photography in Peru became the subject of his first documentary film, Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (1986), made for the BBC's Arena strand, which depicts the life, times, and contemporary relevance of that great Cusqueña photographer of the early 20th century. This was the first of half a dozen documentaries Yule made in Peru over the next two decades, and the start of an award-winning collaboration with the producer Andy Harries.
In 1990 Yule made Trains That Passed In The Night, a lyrical film about another photographer, the American O. Winston Link, whose troubled personal story he was to return to and re-assess 15 years later in The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover (2005).
In 1991-92 Yule's Emmy Award-winning Channel 4 documentary Damned In The USA, a film about censorship and the arts in the US that features Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, became embroiled in a landmark legal dispute. Though the film had already won the International Emmy, Wildmon and the AFA sued Yule, his co-producer Jonathan Stack, and Channel 4 for $8 million in an attempt to stop the distribution of the film, describing it as "blasphemous and obscene". Yule and his co-defendants fought the lawsuit in court in Mississippi and won the legal right to freely exhibit the film. Lou Reed re-wrote the lyrics to his classic "Walk On The Wild Side" in support of the case.
The subject matter of Yule's films has included history, politics, religion, sport, education, and the arts. He has collaborated with several writers, including with Nicholas Shakespeare on films about Mario Vargas Llosa (1990) and Bruce Chatwin (1999); with Peter Oborne on exposés of Robert Mugabe (2003) and the conspiracy surrounding the cricketer Basil D'Oliveira (2004); as well as with Darcus Howe, Miranda Sawyer, Paul Morley and others. In 2003 he directed an acclaimed drama about Sir Edward Elgar, Elgar's Tenth Muse starring James Fox and written by Nigel Gearing. He has also made a number of films in war zones, often shooting his own material - notably Babitski's War (2000, in Chechnya), The House of War (2002, in Afghanistan), Mugabe's Secret Famine (2003, in Zimbabwe), Here's One We Invaded Earlier (2003, in Afghanistan) and All Out In Pakistan (2017, in Pakistan). Producers with whom he has had notable collaborations have included Jonathan Stack, George Carey, Roy Ackerman, Samir Shah and Markus Davies.
In 2008 Yule returned to South Africa to complete a three-film 60-year history of apartheid and its consequences (White Lies, 1994 - about the International Defence and Aid Fund; The Basil D'Oliveira Conspiracy, 2004; and The Captain and the Bookmaker, 2008 – the latter two of which focus on the political history of South Africa as seen through the prism of cricket, including the downfall of Hansie Cronje).
In 2011 Yule was invited to teach filmmaking for a year at The University of Cape Town. While there he originated "The Big Picture", an intensive, hands-on documentary film production course aimed at training a new generation of filmmakers and technicians to make fresh, socially relevant, local programming. In conjunction with this he was centrally involved in the re-launch of Cape Town's community television station, CTV.
In 2013 and 2015 he directed and was show-runner on two seasons of Dream School SA, an acclaimed reality series about education in South Africa.
In 2015/16 he made All Out In Pakistan (BBC, 2017) structured around Peter Oborne's "Wounded Tiger" cricket tours, a film which looks at the relationship of cricket to politics in Pakistan and which one critic described (not unflatteringly) as "P.G. Woodhouse's Apocalypse Now".
Yule is married to the cartoonist Denise Dorrance and has four children.