Multi-Emmy Award winner Jamie Doran has worked at the highest levels of television film production over the past 30 years, with many of his films leading series both nationally and internationally. In that time, those films have been broadcast on virtually every major channel throughout the world. He spent over seven years at BBC Television before establishing an independent television company.
Some of his achievements in the international arena include what was widely described as the definitive film of the Disappeared in Chile; the release of political prisoners from mental institutions in Romania; a dark and ultimately dangerous expose of the brutal regime in Burma; the extraordinary and controversial biography of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, described by London Evening Standard critic Victor Lewis Smith as 'television at its finest'; and the true story of a contemporary Dr Zhivago saga, centred on the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In 2019, he was honoured with the Belfast Ambassador Medal at the Belfast International Homecoming. His ties to Belfast are through is father Gerrie, a Belfast republican who was critically injured while fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
WHEN Al Jazeera asked me to make a documentary series, they must have taken it for granted I would offer them my usual fare of life on the frontline of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
