Rumsey initially worked as an actor at the Quipu Basement Theatre in Greek Street, but after film school, he gained industry experience as an assistant editor and sound recordist.

[2] With the rapid growth of the Independent Sector in the UK, Rumsey was appointed the first salaried Co-ordinator of East Anglian Film-Makers, where he raised money for the group from Channel 4, the British Film Institute and Norwich City Council.

After the release of The Pledge by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1981, Rumsey spent the next year in Europe seeking co-production funds for his first feature film The History of the Devil.

Additionally he moved into directing, working in the corporate sector with clients like the Department of Trade and Industry (United Kingdom), Tate Gallery and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Having made three films based on the work of Lord Dunsany, in 2012 Rumsey embarked on a documentary about the life of this influential and contradictory Irish aristocrat.

In Nature and Time (1975 – the first of the film-maker’s projects to be shot in 35mm) the titular mythical characters stride through London town, ending with a grim prediction about an increasingly urbanised world.

In 1790, the compatriots of an executed highwayman attempt to keep their word to him by cutting down his rotting corpse and interring it in an Archbishop's tomb, believing that only this course of action will free their friend's soul.

Rumsey made two films inspired by the work of English author Ernest Bramah (1868–1942): The Moonlight Comb (1974) shows the film-maker taking five colleagues, costumes and props, to the rugged landscape of Wester Ross in Scotland.

Rejected by his publishers, the poet retreats into a symbolic world, his mind filling with images of robber barons, medieval castles and magical swords.

With The Red Box (2000), Rumsey creates a millennial adaptation of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, an account of the end of the world as seen through the eyes of a small community in Melbourne, Australia.

The film combines actors in a blue screen studio with contemporary images in an examination of human nature, as each character deals differently with their impending doom.

In the 1974 satire The Heist, the film-maker takes centre-stage as he and an accomplice stage a robbery at the production offices of the British Film Institute in London.

Years later, the film-maker investigates the sightings along with local reporter, Kevin Mount, while simultaneously endeavouring to raise money for a feature film.