First Contact (1983 film)
"First Contact" is the first documentary in what later became known as "The Highland Trilogy". The other two films are "Joe Leahy's Neighbours" (1989) and "Black Harvest" (1992). These three films, between them, have won some thirty major awards, included each film winning both the Grand Prix at the Festival Cinéma du Réel in Paris and AFI Award for Best Documentary.
Michael Grigsby
Influenced by John Grierson’s documentary movement, emerging as part of Free Cinema, his approach reaching maturity during documentary television’s golden age, Grigsby at the later stages of his career came full circle. Still as active and enthusiastic as ever despite the current lack of support for independent, imaginative documentaries in British television, amongst a number of new documentary features, he was working to develop his first fiction feature film. He also returned to the place where he made his first film as a pupil, Abingdon School, to set up the AFU Abingdon Film Unit in 2003 with Jeremy Taylor, the school's Head of Drama, where over thirty boys (and girls from the neighbouring school of St Helen and St Katharine), aged 12 to 18, worked together under their supervision along with several other industry professionals to make a handful of short films each year. He was as proud of this new enterprise as of his finest films; he saw it as his own way of passing on the torch of the great British documentary tradition to the next generation of filmmakers. The Abingdon Film Unit itself has gained significant press, owing to films such as "Gravel & Stones" (2007), a documentary which focuses on the impact of disability on people in Cambodia, a country that, after thirty years of war, has one of the highest rates of disability in the developing world; and also "One Foot on the Ground" (2010): a 24-minute film which follows a young Moldovan basketball-player, Andreii Zelenetchii, as he struggles to keep alive his dream of playing professional in Europe’s poorest country.