Mark Kidel

Mark Kidel is a film-maker, writer and critic specialising in the arts and music. He works mainly in the France and the UK. His most recent films include a co-production with the BFI Archive in which the writer Martin Amis explores his sense of Englishness, “Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance”, the first –ever documentary portrait of one of Britain,’s greatest songwriters, and “Road Movie: The Music of John Adams” (Official Selection Telluride Film Festival)
Other recent films include: FIFA (Montreal) award-winner “Colouring Light: Brian Clarke- An Artist Apart” (BBC4), “Set the Piano Stool on Fire” – a film about Alfred Brendel and the young pianist Kit Armstrong, co-produced with ZDF ARTE and Artificial Eye, the Grierson-nominated “Soweto Strings” (2008) and the Grierson award-winer “Hungary 1956: Our Revolution”.

His documentary portraits have included the pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Ravi Shankar, Bill Viola, Norman Foster, Robert Wyatt, Tricky, Derek Jarman, Boy George, and the 20th century composers Varèse and Xenakis. He has also made a number of films on African music, personal film essays on melancholia, the experience of death and loss in Paris’s Hopital Laennec, and a ground-breaking series on architecture and symbolism (BBC2), which made much use of excerpts from classic cinema. He has written widely about music for most of the leading newspapers in the UK. He is a co-founder with Peter Gabriel of WOMAD, the world music festival.

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