Raised in rural Aberdeenshire, he has lived in London and New York, where he began his career working as a grip on feature films. In 2005 he began directing arts documentaries and has since made 18 films on diverse subjects. He won a Grierson Award in 2012 for Middle Class Hero, a film about the British artist Jeremy Deller. In 2015 he won a Scottish BAFTA for Mining Poems or Odes, a documentary short about a welder-turned-poet. In 2016 his Imagine film Life After Death, about the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, won both a Scottish BAFTA and the Royal Television Society award for Director of the Year.