About Paul Yule / Art Photographer and Documentary Filmmaker

Paul Yule is a photographer, documentary filmmaker and sculptor based in London. Berwick Universal Pictures is his Production Company.

Early Career

Photographed the early theatre work of Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of their generation while studying at Oxford between 1975-78. In 1979 went to Peru from which followed The New Incas (1983), a book of photographs published by The New Pyramid Press, and his first film, Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (1986), a documentary about the iconic Peruvian photographer made for the BBC’s Arena strand. Trains That Passed in the Night (1990), for Channel 4, was a film about the great American photographer of steam, O. Winston Link, whose troubled personal story he returned to more than a decade later in The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover (2005).

Damned In The USA

Yule’s documentary about censorship and the arts, Damned in the USA, won the International Emmy for Best Documentary before becoming embroiled in a landmark legal dispute in 1991/2. In an attempt to stop US distribution, Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association sued Yule, his co-producer Jonathan Stack, and Channel 4 for $8 million. Wildmon described the film as “blasphemous and obscene”. Channel 4 fought the high-profile 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.

Other films

Made the acclaimed Good Morning Mr. Hitler! in 1993 with Luke Holland. In 1996 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.

Other award-winning films include Babitski’s War (2000 – in Chechnya), The House of War (2002 – in Afghanistan), Mugabe’s Secret Famine (2003 – in Zimbabwe) and The Last Waterloo Cup (2005). In 2008, 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) made with Peter Oborne. Another film about the relationship between sport and politics (also made in collaboration with Oborne) was All Out In Pakistan (2016), which follows the parallel stories of the creation of the state of Pakistan and the troubled history its cricket. In South Africa, Yule has taught at The University of Cape Town, directed and was show-runner on two series of Dream School SA (2013-15), and made The Life of Jo Menell (2019), a documentary portrait of the iconoclastic activist filmmaker.

Photojournalism and Sculpture

Throughout, Yule has continued to work as a photojournalist. A retrospective of his photographic work, My Developing Eye, was published in 2021 together with an updated version of The New Incas. Since then, and following the death of his son Giuseppe, he has begun to exhibit his sculpture.