Adam Curtis

Director

May 26, 1955 (71 years)

Dartford, Kent, England, UK

Biography

Adam Curtis (born 1955) is an award-winning British documentarian and writer. He has also worked as a television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs. His programmes express a clear, albeit sometimes controversial, opinion about their subject.

Filmography

4.0

Inside Story

A BBC documentary film strand, with the focus on investigative journalism.

6.4

40 Minutes

40 Minutes was a BBC TV documentary strand broadcast on BBC Two between 1981 and 1994. The documentaries could be on any possible subject, the only connection being that they last forty minutes. Some documentaries in the original series were revisited and updated in a 2006 version, Forty Minutes On.

6.0

The Way

Strikes in Port Talbot spark a revolution – and a family of fugitives go on the run. Facing impossible choices, what would you do?

9.0

Modern Times

Documentaries showing faces and places that make up the way we live today.

8.5

The Century of the Self

The legacy of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud informs the lives of people throughout the world even to this day, though it's a phenomenon to which most are unaware. The film is an exhaustive examination of his theories on human desire, and how they're applied to platforms such as advertising, consumerism and politics.

8.0

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

8.1

The Power of Nightmares

Examines how politicians have used our fears to increase their power and control over society.

8.6

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone

What it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy. A series of films by Adam Curtis.

8.3

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

We have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

7.5

HyperNormalisation

We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…

7.8

Can't Get You Out of My Head

In six films, Adam Curtis traces the different forces across the world that have led to now. It covers a wide range—including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.

7.4

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.

7.6

Bitter Lake

An experimental documentary that explores Saudi Arabia's relationship with the U.S. and the role this has played in the war in Afghanistan.

N/A

Just Another Day

Just Another Day is a BBC documentary series, shown over twenty thirty minute episodes. The series follows John Pitman observing a typical day in the life of places, businesses and institutions that are considered part of the British way of life.

6.7

An Ocean Apart

When the 20th century opened, Britain dominated world affairs, and America stood on the sidelines. Now their positions are reversed. This is the story of how it happened.

7.7

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker was a British news review programme broadcast on BBC Four written and presented by Charlie Brooker. It is similar to Brooker's Screenwipe series which is also shown on BBC Four. A first series of six episodes ran between 25 March 2009 and 29 April 2009. A second series began on 19 January 2010 and concluded on 23 February 2010.

6.9

Shifty

When power begins to shift in society, everything becomes unstable, exciting and frightening. Living in Britain at the end of the 20th century.

N/A

The Kingdom of Fun

The largest leisure and shopping complex in Europe, the Metro Centre in Tynemouth, and its creator John Hall.

7.1

The Living Dead

This series investigated the way that history and memory have been used by politicians and others.

6.9

The Mayfair Set

The Mayfair Set is a series of programmes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC, first broadcast in the summer of 1999. The programme looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of London's Clermont Club in the 1960s.