Welcome to Walker George Films

Latest news

Walker George films are delighted to announce that A Boy Called Alex has been nominated for 3 BAFTA awards: Best Documentary, Best Director (Stephen Walker) and Best Editing (Ben Stark).  

The film was also nominated for a Broadcast Award and a Royal Television Society Award in the Best Documentary categories, and won a Royal Television Society Craft Award for Best Photography and Sound.

Meanwhile the award-winning documentary, Young@Heart, will be available on DVD in the UK and Ireland from mid-May. The film is currently completing a six-month run in art house cinemas across the country and continues to receive outstanding reviews from the critics.

Over the past year Young@Heart has been released in cinemas in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Australia, New Zealand,  South Korea and Japan, winning 17 film festival awards around the world. Each of these countries will be releasing their own DVDs in the coming months. In the US and Canada, the DVD has already been released by Twentieth Century Fox. Please see www.foxsearchlight.com/youngatheart for more details.

Other news

We are currently in production with The Continuing Adventures of A Boy Called Alex. Following the success of the original film, A Boy Called Alex, Channel 4 have commissioned a sequel about the remarkable young man Alexander Stobbs, a gifted musician suffering from cystic fibrosis. Alex is now in his first year as a Choral Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge University. The new film is due to be broadcast as part of Channel 4’s Cutting Edge season in autumn 2009.

In other news, Walker George Films are in development with Working Title on a feature film inspired by the documentary Young@Heart. The screenplay is being written by the American screenwriter Bob Nelson.

Working Title are also in development on the big screen adaptation of Stephen Walker’s New York Times bestselling book, Shockwave, the gripping story of the final three weeks before the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Screenwriter is David Benioff, whose credits include X-Men, Kiterunner and Troy.

Past productions

Brothers and Sisters in Love is about one of the most secret taboos of all – incestuous love. Directed by Sally George and produced by Stephen Walker, the film features siblings who never knew each other as children yet fall in love when they meet as adults. The film includes the extraordinary case of a German brother and sister who had four children together and challenged Germany's incest laws in the Supreme Court.  Brothers and Sisters in Love was broadcast on ITV1’s primetime 9pm slot in June 2008 and was Pick of the Day in almost all national newspapers, receiving outstanding reviews. 

A Boy called Alex opened Channel 4’s Cutting Edge season in January 2008. A documentary film about a 16 year-old musical prodigy at Eton College who suffers from cystic fibrosis, the film was directed by Stephen Walker and produced by Sally George. It attracted one of the highest-ever audience’s of a Cutting Edge run and rave reviews:

‘Astounding, life-affirming…quite simply the impact of Stephen Walker’s film is overwhelming.’
The Times

‘Don’t miss this gripping, inspiring, uplifting and humbling film.’
Daily Mail. 

Other past productions include George Melly’s Last Stand, directed by Katie Buchanan. The film documentes the last months of the flamboyant British jazz-singer’s life before he died of cancer, and was short-listed for a Grierson Award in the Best Arts Documentary category 2008. George Melly’s Last Stand was described by Time Out as ‘A great documentary...perhaps the funniest thing you’ll see all year’.

Walker George also produced Silver Surfers for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge, a warn and affectionate portrait of pensioners using the internet to find love. The film was directed by Ursula MacFarlane (Breaking up with the Jones’s).

Walker George Film’s first film Young@Heart, a feature-length musical documentary about an American chorus of pensioners who sing rock ’n’ roll, was directed by Stephen Walker and produced by Sally George and originally broadcast on Channel 4 television in November, 2006. The film was critically acclaimed and picked by both Time Out and the Radio Times as the best documentary of 2006. Clips have attracted well over two million hits on YouTube.

Young@Heart won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2007, where it was acquired by Fox Searchlight for theatrical release, the studio behind hits such as Juno, Little Miss Sunshine and Sideways. The film has since won numerous international awards including:

Winner of Two Rose D’Or Awards, Lucerne, Switzerland 2007: Best Arts Documentary and Best of 2007 Special Prize
Winner Audience Award for Best International Feature, Los Angeles Film Festival 2007
Winner Audience Award, Atlanta Film Festival, USA 2008
Winner Impact of Music Award, Nashville Independent Film Festival, USA 2008
Winner Audience Award for Best Documentary, Sydney Film Festival, Australia 2008
Winner Jury Prize (Le Pari du Jury) and Audience Prize (Le Pari du Public), Paris Cinema International Film Festival, France 2008
Winner Humanitas Award for Best Documentary Los Angeles 2008
Winner Audience Award, Ghent Film Festival, Belgium 2008
Winner Audience Award, Bergen International Film Festival, Norway 2008
Winner Audience Award, Documentary, Warsaw Film Festival, Poland 2008
Winner Alan Ett Best Music Award, The International Documentary Awards (L.A.) 2008
Winner Audience Award for I FEEL GOOD! (Young@Heart), The Festival D’automne, Gardanne (France), 2008
Winner Audience Award for I FEEL GOOD! (Young@Heart), Les Rencontres Cinématographiques de Dijon (France), 2008
Awarded the Christopher Award for Film, (Young@Heart), Christopher Awards, New York (USA), 2009   Winner Audience Award 2009 (Young@Heart), The Keswick Film Festival 2009

Company

Set up by filmmakers Stephen Walker and Sally George in 2006, Walker George Films is a production company dedicated to making the sort of high-quality films – documentaries, drama documentaries, and dramas - which have won Stephen and Sally widespread praise over many years of filmmaking for BBC, Channel 4, and ITV.

We are also committed to working with established and new talent across a range of television and feature film genres.

Director: Stephen Walker has directed 24 films for both the BBC and Channel 4, including Young@Heart, a documentary feature film about an American chorus of pensioners who sing rock music, which was released by Twentieth Century Fox in US cinemas in April 2008 and opens in the UK and across Europe in October. The film has won awards in numerous film festivals around the world, including Paris, Sydney, Los Angeles, Nashville and Atlanta.

Other recent films include A Boy Called Alex; Hiroshima, A Day That Shook The World, nominated in 2004 for three Emmys including Best Director and Best Cinematography, winner of an Emmy for Best Music and Sound, winner of the National Geographic Cine Golden Eagle Award; and Faking It: Punk to Conductor, winner of a 2003 BAFTA and both the Montreux Rose D’Or and International Press Prizes for Best Documentary. His drama films include Prisoners in Time, starring John Hurt (winner of the Writer’s Guild award for Best Television Drama). Stephen was voted by the industry as one of the UK’s top ten television directors of 2008, according to Broadcast magazine.

Stephen has also written two books, King of Cannes (Bloomsbury 2001) and most recently Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima(John Murray & Harper Collins USA 2005) which reached the New York Times Bestseller List in August 2005. Shockwave has recently been optioned by Working Title Films for development as a feature film, the screenplay to be written by David Benioff (‘Kiterunner’).

For further information or queries, please contact us on:

T +44 (0) 208 743 7733
F +44 (0) 208 743 7774
E info@walkergeorgefilms.co.uk

Fourth Floor, Threshold & Union House
65-69 Shepherds Bush Green,
London W12 8QE United Kingdom