Karl Francis

Director

April 1, 1942 (84 years)

Bedwas, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK

Biography

Karl Francis is a Welsh film and television director, producer and screenwriter. He studied at Manchester University and then attended Hornsey College of Art in London to study for a post-graduate diploma on Film in Education. He was appointed the Head of Drama at BBC Wales in 1995.

Filmography

7.1

Screen Two

Series of single made-for-television dramas.

6.0

ScreenPlay

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.

7.2

Screen One

Anthology drama series.

8.2

Civvies

Former soldiers in Britain's elite Parachute Regiment struggle to come to terms with civilian life after leaving the army.

8.0

The Lifeboat

The lives and missions of the crew of a Welsh rescue boat.

6.3

One of the Hollywood Ten

Herbert Biberman struggles as a Hollywood writer and director blacklisted as one of The Hollywood Ten in the 1950s.

5.6

Giro City

Welsh investigative journalists set out to cover the Troubles in Northern Ireland only to unearth censorship and corruption back home.

6.5

Rebecca's Daughters

Young aristocrat Anthony Raine returns home from India to find the farmers of Pembrokeshire protesting about the rates of a tollgate run by The Whitman Turnpike Trust, headed by the drunken Lord Sarn. So Raine dons a mask and, calling himself Rebecca, instructs his followers to dress as women as they attack the tolls, leading the common people to victory over their masters.

7.5

Boy Soldier

A young Welsh soldier on duty in Northern Ireland finds himself used as a political pawn, following a tragic incident during a violent clash with some of the local agitators. The Guardian proposed that "if Spielberg's ET, in the immortal words of Pauline Kael, was a bliss out, Karl Francis' 'Boy Soldier' is a bleed out for sheer fist shaking emotionalism, it would be hard to find another British film of recent years to beat it."

N/A

Nineteen96

Britain in the mid-1990s: a divided, violent nation where civil disorder and urban terrorism are on the increase. Scotland Yard detective Commander Jack Bentham is seconded to Wales to look into a series of shootings by police officers, and uncovers a complex web of deceit and corruption

N/A

A Breed of Men

The story was inspired by the stay-down strikers in the 1930s who refused to leave the mines for three weeks. Ernie Bailey, one of the miners, relayed the story to director Karl Francis, but declined appearing in the film because HTV would not pay him on a scale comparable to Tom Jones. Mr. Bailey smoked to his dying day at the age of 99: always a staunch socialist.

8.5

The Happy Alcoholic

A stark drama about one man's struggle with alcoholism and the impact this has on his family, friends, and work. His gradual disintegration is a reflection of the decaying mining community around him.

9.0

Morphine and Dolly Mixtures

A girl's childhood in the 1950s with her brutal alcoholic father. This unrelieved melodrama examines the nature of a child's experience of a domineering, volatile alcoholic parent. It is based on an autobiographical account by Carol-Ann Courtney. At first, the girl has some diversion from her intense and frightening relationship with her father in the person of her maternal grandmother, but that outlet is soon closed when her father bans her from their home.

N/A

Murder in Oakland

Oakland, California is the murder capital of the USA - there were 161 homicides in 1990 in a city the size of Cardiff. Blue and Eric are new additions to the police department's five overworked homicide teams. When they investigate a seemingly motiveless prostitute killing, they find themselves drawn into the centre of a fight for survival among Oakland's dangerous drug gangs.

4.7

The Angry Earth

About the oppression of the Welsh coal miners during the 19th century and early 20th century as seen through the the eyes of Gwen, a 110 year old woman.

N/A

Rough Justice

Portrait of a fractious Welsh village near Merthyr Tydfil. Life in the valley isn't what it was, there's no pit in Deri now, but the humour survives, and it's amazingly peaceful considering.

7.0

Above Us the Earth

Independent Welsh filmmaker Karl Francis uses amateur and professional actors to explore the community impact of the 1975 closure of the Ogilvie Colliery in the Rhymney Valley, a few miles from his family home. Critical of the National Coal Board and the trade unions, the film focuses on the fractious interactions between politicians and union leaders, teasing out the forces that are attempting to divide the community.

8.0

Streetlife

The rough urban life in a Welsh valley that focuses on Jo, a single mother who has just become pregnant by her married boyfriend Kevin.

N/A

From Bridgend to Basilica

A documentary film which tells the story of a Bridgend-born Roman Catholic priest, who rose to the high role of Monsignor at the Basilica in Rome.

9.0

Afternoon of War

Adapted from the short story "The Mouse and the Woman" by Dylan Thomas, it is a story set in the secluded valleys of Wales during the 1914-18 war. The story of a man who is as handy with his fists as with his poetic fantasy. His masculinity fascinates Gilda, the wife of the owner of the mine.