Adam Curtis (born 1955) is an award-winning British documentarian and writer. He has also worked as a television producer, director and narrator. He works for BBC Current Affairs. His programmes express a clear, albeit sometimes controversial, opinion about their subject.
Strikes in Port Talbot spark a revolution – and a family of fugitives go on the run. Facing impossible choices, what would you do?
Release Date:2024-02-19
Department:Production
Job:Executive Producer
Episode Count:3
Vote Count:8
Visual accompaniment to Weyes Blood's 'God Turn Me Into A Flower', played alongside a performance of the song during her 2023 tour.
Release Date:2023-05-01
Department:Directing
Job:Director
What it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy. A series of films by Adam Curtis.
Release Date:2022-10-13
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:7
Vote Count:11
In six films, Adam Curtis traces the different forces across the world that have led to now. It covers a wide range—including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.
Release Date:2021-02-11
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Himself (Narrator)
Episode Count:6
Vote Count:18
The Rosie Kay Dance Company present a piece about the strange history and pop-cultural aftermath of CIA mind control experiments during the Cold War, with documentary segments by Adam Curtis.
Release Date:2020-04-02
Department:Crew
Job:Creative Consultant
Character:Narrator
Vote Count:1
We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…
Release Date:2016-10-25
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Self - Narrator (voice)
Vote Count:131
Short film for Vice Media about the illusion of stability, freedom, and prosperity in the West, comparing it to life in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Ends with a trailer for HyperNormalisation.
Release Date:2016-10-15
Department:Directing
Job:Director
An experimental documentary that explores Saudi Arabia's relationship with the U.S. and the role this has played in the war in Afghanistan.
Release Date:2015-01-24
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator
Vote Count:82
Short film examining the global events of 2014 to reveal a chaotic morass, the reporting of which is increasingly difficult to comprehend in the context of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet. Screened during Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe special.
Release Date:2014-08-03
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator (voice)
Vote Count:6
As we wait to see whether Rupert Murdoch will fall from power and lose control of News International, Every Day is Like Sunday tells the forgotten story of the dramatic downfall of Cecil King—the newspaper mogul who used to dominate British media in the 1960s, before Rupert Murdoch arrived.
Release Date:2011-07-27
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator
Vote Count:3
We have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Release Date:2011-05-23
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Self - Narrator (voice)
Episode Count:3
Vote Count:47
Short film using the paranoia of Richard Nixon to explore how a similar outlook on life has been propagated on a larger social scale in the new media age and the resulting moral panics and immobilisation of politics. Screen during the fourth episode of the second series of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.
Release Date:2010-08-03
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Director
This short film uses the history and figure of the Murdoch media empire as a vast invasive machine, to draw parallels to new media machines such as Google that are not only more invasive, but more pervasive than anything the Murdoch media empire has managed. Why are we not more concerned about this?
Release Date:2010-01-01
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Short film about how mainstream media simplify complex events and present them as "scattered terrible things happening everywhere, Oh Dear", leaving the public feeling powerless to do anything about them. Screened in the third episode of the first series of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.
Release Date:2009-08-03
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Character:Narrator (voice)
Vote Count:1
The story of America's rise to power starting with 1959, using archival footage and US pop music to highlight the consequences to the rest of the world and in the peoples' minds.
Release Date:2009-07-02
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Vote Count:29
Adam Curtis' short films from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and Newswipe programmes.
Release Date:2007-10-09
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:5
Short film chronicling the transformation of mainstream media and the balance of political power in the last few decades by looking at how the role of the broadcast journalist has changed since the 1950s. Screened during the third episode of the fourth series of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.
Release Date:2007-08-03
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.
Release Date:2007-03-11
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator
Episode Count:3
Vote Count:30
Examines how politicians have used our fears to increase their power and control over society.
Release Date:2004-10-20
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Character:Narrator
Episode Count:3
Vote Count:69
The legacy of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud informs the lives of people throughout the world even to this day, though it's a phenomenon to which most are unaware. The film is an exhaustive examination of his theories on human desire, and how they're applied to platforms such as advertising, consumerism and politics.
Release Date:2002-03-17
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Character:Narrator
Episode Count:4
Vote Count:105
The Mayfair Set is a series of programmes produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC, first broadcast in the summer of 1999. The programme looked at how buccaneer capitalists of hot money were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on the rise of Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, all members of London's Clermont Club in the 1960s.
Release Date:1999-07-18
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Episode Count:4
Vote Count:9
An alcoholic, emaciated father; a grossly obese, tattooed mother; a goofy, hormone-addled brother—all together in a claustrophobic council flat. Welcome to the Billinghams'. Richard Billingham wowed the art scene with his book Ray's A Laugh. Fishtank, his first film, charts the emotional territory of the flat and the family who play out their lives within its confines.
Release Date:1998-12-13
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Vote Count:3
In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.
Release Date:1997-03-19
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator
Vote Count:5
25 Million Pounds details the collapse of Barings Bank in the mid 1990s primarily by a broker called Nick Leeson, who lost £827 million ($1.3 billion) by speculating on futures contracts. The film contextualises the downfall as the history of Barings Bank was one of the oldest and most prestigious merchant banks in Britain, run by the same family for decades with extensive ties to Britain's elites. But in the late 19th century Barings almost went bankrupt after investing heavily in South American bonds, including backing the construction of a sewer system in Buenos Aires. The bank was saved by The Bank of England, but Edward Baring, the head of the bank, was financially ruined and never recovered.
Release Date:1996-06-12
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Vote Count:1
This series investigated the way that history and memory have been used by politicians and others.
Release Date:1995-03-15
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Character:Narrator
Episode Count:3
Vote Count:9
Pandora's Box is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
Release Date:1992-06-11
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Character:Narrator
Episode Count:6
Vote Count:14
In The Road to Terror, revolutionaries tell how their dream descended into a nightmare of terror and execution. They speak as exiles in Paris, a city that is preparing to celebrate the glories of the first mass revolution of 1978. Behind its strange images, the struggle for power in the Iranian revolution has followed a pattern uncannily similar to many of the great revolutions of the past: just as 200 years ago in France, the Iranian revolution has gone down the old road from liberation to repression, the road to terror.
Release Date:1989-12-24
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Vote Count:2
The largest leisure and shopping complex in Europe, the Metro Centre in Tynemouth, and its creator John Hall.
Release Date:1989-01-19
Department:Directing
Job:Director
When the 20th century opened, Britain dominated world affairs, and America stood on the sidelines. Now their positions are reversed. This is the story of how it happened.
Release Date:1988-04-20
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Episode Count:7
Vote Count:2
The luxurious Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, contrasted with the poverty of the city's slums.
Release Date:1987-04-30
Department:Directing
Job:Director
In 1949, at the height of the Cold War, the British and American Governments decided to fight back at the growing Soviet Empire with a secret plan, the Albanian Subversion, in which the CIA and MI6 attempted to overthrow the Albanian government and to weaken the Soviet Union and the role of double agent Kim Philby.
Release Date:1984-10-30
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Vote Count:1
Dino Labriola runs the small town of Montemilone in the deep south. He was elected the first Communist mayor. Now he faces the problems of a town dying on its feet. There are no jobs, the young emigrate, the old have given up hope and government aid often goes astray. While Dino is determined to fight for his town, his wife Angela sometimes feels that the struggle is not worth it. A massive dam is being built just outside Montemilone. It's a new threat to the town and to Dino's position as mayor.
Release Date:1984-10-26
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Vote Count:1
David Jones investigates how 1960s council housing came to be built so poorly that thousands later needed to be demolished.
Release Date:1984-09-04
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Vote Count:4
The history of war correspondents.
Release Date:1983-07-19
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Documentary about the town of Walton-on-the-Naze, directed by Adam Curtis
Release Date:1983-04-19
Department:Directing
Job:Director
Behind the scenes at Selfridges, a department store on Oxford Street, London.
Release Date:1983-03-29
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Episode Count:1
Vote Count:2
An anthology series about people who are suddenly confronted with uncertain situations.
Release Date:1950-04-29
Vote Count:1