Roger Arthur Graef OBE (18 April 1936 – 2 March 2022) was an American-born British documentary filmmaker and theatre director.
Born in New York City, he moved to Britain in 1962, where he began a career producing documentary films investigating previously closed institutions, including Government ministries and court buildings.
[5] He directed two network dramas for CBS, including The Seven who were Hanged, a one-hour special adapted and produced by Robert Herridge from the Leonid Andreyev novel of the same name.
[citation needed] Graef moved to Britain in 1962 and directed Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment at the Royal Court and Wyndham's Theatre in the West End of London.
It won the Silver Dragon Prize in Kraków, Poland, and was broadcast by the BBC, CBC, and ABC Scope in the U.S., as well as being added to medical school curricula.
Graef commented in a BBC interview in 2014 that "nobody had ever seen them as people, they had only seen them as cases and it entered medical school curricula immediately because doctors had never seen them at home".
[6] Graef's film The Life and Times of John Huston, Esq for the BBC, CBC, and NET in the US, was one of the first documentary co-productions for television.
[citation needed] He subsequently produced the 13-part series Who Is on artists, architects, writers, and composers for BBC, CBC, NET, and Bayerischer Rundfunk, also directing the episodes on Jacques Lipchitz, Pierre Boulez, Walter Gropius, and Maurice Béjart.
[citation needed] Working with his collaborator cameraman Charles Stewart, Graef made the first "fly-on-the wall" purely observational series The Space between Words in 1972 for the BBC and PBS, including Politics, the first documentary filmed inside the U.S. Senate, and Diplomacy, the first unstaged film inside the United Nations.
[citation needed] Together with Simon Jenkins, he made a film for Arena which revealed that a Grade II listed building was demolished every day during Save Britain's Heritage Year.
In 2015 he was part of the four-person Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Commission on the Future of Housing, chaired by John Banham.
In 1984 he co-produced the first Comic Relief with Richard Curtis, and Look at the State We're In (BBC), a series of short satirical films on constitutional reform, with John Cleese, Hugh Laurie, Dawn French, and Anthony Sher.
[9] As a criminologist, he made more than 30 films on police and criminal justice issues, including Police, Operation Carter, In Search of Law and Order UK (Channel 4) and In Search of Law and Order – USA (PBS and Channel 4) on positive ways to address youth offending, which influenced the National Youth Justice Board.
For Channel Four he made Race Against Crime, and The Siege of Scotland Yard around the run-up and publication of the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence (2000).
[10] In 2017, he was a guest on John Lloyd's radio comedy show The Museum of Curiosity alongside Phill Jupitus and Prue Leith.
In 1979, Roger Graef founded Films of Record, a documentary production company that specialises in tackling difficult subjects,[clarification needed] and securing access to previously closed institutions.
Other productions include Murder Blues, following Operation Trident on black-on-black gun crime, the BAFTA-nominated Kids in Care, a Panorama Special, The Trouble with Pirates on the impact of Somali piracy; and Amnesty!