Paul Yule is a photojournalist and film maker and Berwick Universal Pictures is his Production Company (the name comes from a basement studio in Berwick Street, London). You can buy Limited Edition prints of Yule’s photographs and books, and watch his documentary films here.
Career: In 1979, after photographing the early theatre work of Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of that generation, Yule went to Peru. There followed The New Incas (1983), a book of his photographs from Peru published by The New Pyramid Press, and his first documentary, Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (1986), made for the BBC’s Arena strand. Trains That Passed in the Night (1990) was a film about another great photographer, the American O. Winston Link, whose troubled personal story he returned to in The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover (2005).
In 1991/2 Yule’s documentary Damned in the USA became embroiled in a landmark legal dispute. The film, about censorship and the arts in the US, had already won the International Emmy when one of the participants, Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, sued Yule, his co-producer Jonathan Stack, and Channel 4 for $8 million in an attempt to stop US distribution, describing it as “blasphemous and obscene”. Channel 4 fought the lawsuit in court in Mississippi – and won – but not before Lou Reed had re-written the lyrics to his classic Walk on the Wild Side in support of the case.
In 1996 Yule directed Elgar’s Tenth Muse, a drama about the composer Sir Edward Elgar starring James Fox and written by Nigel Gearing. In The Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (1999) was a 2-part biography of the writer made together with Nicholas Shakespeare. In 2008 he completed a three-film 60-year history of apartheid in South Africa and its consequences, partly told through the prism of sport, including The Basil D’Oliveira Conspiracy (2004). Other award-winning films include Babitski’s War (in Chechnya), The House of War (in Afghanistan), Mugabe’s Secret Famine (in Zimbabwe), and All Out In Pakistan (2017). He has made two series of Dream School SA in South Africa, and most recently completed The Life of Jo Menell (2019), a portrait of the iconoclastic activist filmmaker.