Available as a camera operator or self-shooting director for NGO films and international assignments. I can work to your producer’s brief, help develop the interviews and story, or take the film through to the final edit.
Director of photography on a Sundance award-winner. Director, camera and field producer for Save the Children.
Bring me the programme, the reports and the problem — or your producer’s filming brief.
Most of my films have involved close collaboration with NGOs, from commissions for Save the Children and Greenpeace to documentaries including Kidnapped Brides in Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine’s Lost Children.
I read the programme documents, evaluations and reports, and talk to the people who run the work, before the camera comes out.
Contributors, access, consent, interview guides, and the detail an audience will remember.
Film to your producer’s brief, help develop interviews and the story, or lead the film. I work alongside country teams and local crew, and edit in Premiere, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
Commissioned films, NGO collaborations and independent reporting.
My recent filming work includes bespoke client commissions. The films here are a selection of my public work.
It started asChildren after a disaster.
At 14, Vergel had just got a job on a fishing boat. Then the typhoon took the boats.
Director, camera and field producer; photography
It started asGreenpeace’s campaign against Arctic oil drilling.
What is it actually like on the ship, and who sails into an oil protest?
Onboard journalist and filmmaker
It started asLocal television journalists reporting the takeover of Crimea.
Following Crimean Tatar journalists as they report events unfolding around them.
Director, camera and field producer
It started asRoma children deported from Germany to Kosovo.
German-born teenagers sent to a country they’ve never lived in, and just how German they are.
Director
It started asThe legacy of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan: a well-told story.
On the former test site, a woman is determined to have a child. Her doctor is determined to stop her.
Director and cinematographer
“One of the most important and valuable films of the year” Evening Standard, four stars
It started asA 40-second protest in Moscow’s cathedral.
Who are the women behind the balaclavas?
Director of photography
“Captivating and profoundly dismaying” The Washington Post
It started asRussia against Ukraine, East against West.
Behind the geopolitics: the people building a breakaway country, and the Russians they hoped would save them.
Director, co-producer and cinematographer
“A must-see” Télérama
It started asInsurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus.
The security forces and the militants, both on camera. And the families caught between them.
Reporter and co-producer
It started asAn abstract argument about trading flexibility in when people use electricity.
A live-action game: help an ambitious minister become president, then live with the future your choices create.
Conceived, written and directed by Antony Butts
It started asA breakaway republic, declared in 2014.
The handmade country, filmed from inside in its first year.
Opening film, Docudays UA, Kyiv, 2015. Jury Special Mention, Artdocfest 2014. UK premiere at the Frontline Club, 2015.
Festival page (opens in a new tab)It started asMarriage tourism: gold-diggers and older men shopping for young brides.
Old men wanting their youth back, and young women escaping domestic violence.
15 million YouTube views.
It started asBride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.
Part one: a groom’s whole family waits while he tries to kidnap woman after woman. Part two: a woman who escaped is shamed, abandoned and considers suicide.
Made in close collaboration with NGOs working in Kyrgyzstan.
It started asRunaway children from broken families.
A cat-and-mouse chase between police and children who trust only each other. I lived with them in the pipes where they slept, and caught scabies.
Made in close collaboration with NGOs working in Ukraine.
It started asThe Aral Sea coming back.
An old captain roams the trawlers stranded on the desert floor while a young family hauls scrawny fish from the returning sea, full of hope.
It started asNeo-Nazis in Russia.
Russian fantasies about Black men, from lover to rapper to criminal, and mixed-race children abandoned by their fathers and pursued by neo-Nazis.
It started asThe Chernobyl exclusion zone, 20 years on.
A darkly comic adventure: scientists drinking vodka, eating radioactive fish and swapping myths about radiation.
It started asRadiation and genetics in Kazakhstan.
A month of field research before filming turned a sensational subject into an evidence-based film.
Part of VICE’s second season, which won the 2014 Emmy for Outstanding Informational Series or Special.
Television Academy (opens in a new tab)It started asChemical weapons and the people who supply them.
Survivors of the Anfal campaign in Halabja, a narrow escape from an ISIS kidnap team on the Syrian–Turkish border, and a convicted supplier of precursor chemicals, doorstepped.
Documentary filming and research, including West Africa.
Filmed in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Iraq, the Philippines, Tahiti and Brazil. West Africa: FMNR research in Mali, on farmer-managed natural regeneration in the Sahel. Four years living in Russia, a year in Kyrgyzstan and a year on the test site in Kazakhstan; I work in English and Russian.
A film, a series of short stories, or a documentary element inside a wider project.