Marc J. Francis is a director, producer and cinematographer whose documentary films have won world wide critical acclaim and have been distributed across cinemas, television and streaming platforms.
He was chosen by Harper’s Bazaar magazine as one of their top “Household names of the future”, and named by the Observer newspaper as one of Britain’s “Rising Stars”.
As a storyteller and seeker of wisdom Marc shines a light on the human condition by exploring the extraordinary stories of marginalised characters and unsung heroes in his signature immersive and intimate style.
His most recent film 'Walk With Me’ about Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as narrator, launched at the SXSW Film Festival and was a global box office hit before being released on Netflix and Amazon. Its sister project ‘Walk With Me In Sound’ is a meditative audio experience, due for release in 2021 by Penguin Random House and Sounds True.
His current directorial work includes a documentary featuring Elizabeth Gilbert (Author: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’) and her former Syrian-American partner Rayya Elias - who passed away after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Capturing Rayya’s final months with those closest to her, the film will be a profound insight into what it means to grieve and to live life fully.
Marc's early directorial work includes 'Black Gold'; described as “riveting and draw-dropping” (LA Times), it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival winning world wide critical acclaim and went on to be released in over twenty countries around the world. Black Gold, which follows the campaigning efforts of an Ethiopian coffee union leader, is credited with propelling the Fair Trade movement. Marc followed up with ‘When China Met Africa,’ - a multi-broadcast project with the BBC, Arte France, and the Sundance Institute.
As an Executive Producer and story consultant for filmmakers and production companies, Marc has established relationships with leading broadcast and distribution organisations around the world, including the BBC and The Guardian, and helped others shape and tell their own stories.
He is also the co-founder and creative director of his own production company - Speakit.
Marc’s journey into filmmaking
Prior to his film career, Marc attended the University of Leeds in the UK where he learned how to read, write and speak Chinese Mandarin. He later lived in China, where his curiosity to tell stories began. Here he photographed and captured life throughout China while the country was going through a period of massive economic change as it embraced capitalism and western culture.
While in China he was commissioned by BBC Radio 4, to make a travel documentary about the Dong minority, who lived in the isolated mountains of South West China. They were known for using song as a way of preserving their history and legend through the ages, as well as using it as a way to court and find love in the local villages.
China has provided a huge influence over Marc’s filmmaking as he studied Chinese cinema and learned about the leading Chinese filmmakers, before deciding to carve out a path as an artist living in the UK, and where he embraced the arrival of digital technology to make video and sound installation art works.
He later teamed up with his brother Nick Francis who won a commission from Channel 4 to co-direct a documentary about a protest movement to shut down Britains’ largest nuclear weapon submarine facility in Faslane in Scotland.
By 2004, he set up his production company, Speakit, with Nick Francis to produce their first feature documentary...Black Gold, and established themselves as part of the new wave of documentary filmmakers spearheading the feature length genre.
