Columbia Alumni Nominated for BAFTA Television Awards
Three Columbia filmmakers have been nominated for 2019 BAFTA Awards in Television.
Informer, a series written by alumni Rory Haines '11 and Sohrab Noshirvani '12, was nominated in the "Drama Series", and Dan Cogan was nominated in BAFTA's “International" category for Reporting Trump's First Year: The Fourth Estate (Storyville), along with Liz Garbus, Jenny Carchman, and Justin Wilkes for Radical Media / BBC Two. Cogan is a producer on the series.
Informer is produced by the BBC and directed by Jonny Campbell, who previously directed an episode of Westworld in 2016. It is “a complex, character-driven thriller about Raza, a young second-generation British-Pakistani man from East London (Nabhaan Rizwan) who is coerced by Gabe, a Counter-Terrorism Officer (Paddy Considine) into informing for him,” as described on the BBC.
In an interview with the BBC, Haines and Noshirvani said they met in their first screenwriting class at Columbia, and have been writing together for the last ten years. Their feature script From Here to Albion was put on the Blacklist in 2013 and purchased by Participant. They also co-wrote The State, which was purchased by Fox in 2016.
Reporting Trump's First Year: The Fourth Estate is a look at how The New York Times covered President Trump's controversial first year in office. The Guardian wrote, “Beginning on the day of Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times opened its doors to cameras as two reporting teams – one in New York, one in Washington – scrambled to figure out how to cover a White House like no other.”
Cogan is an American film producer and director, best known for co-producing the Bryan Fogel-directed Icarus, for which they won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017.
The British Academy Television Awards, also known as the BAFTA TV Awards, are presented in an annual award show hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. They have been awarded annually since 1955. The 2019 award ceremony will take place May 12, 2019.