30/11/09

Head of UWN Film School Scoops International Gold

The Association for International Broadcasting announced the winners of the 2009 Global Media Excellence Awards at a gala event in London in November, which saw documentary filmmaker Christopher Morris, the new Head of the Film School at the University of Wales, Newport, come away from the evening with a Gold Award for ‘Best Current Affairs Radio Documentary’.

The awards recognise creativity and innovation in global broadcasting across TV, radio, cross-media, marketing and technology.

The winning documentary, entitled ‘Children of God’ (made with Cardiff based production company Tinderbox) tells the story of the youngest ordained minister in the world - American child evangelist prodigy Terry Durham.

BAFTA award winning documentary filmmaker Christopher Morris set out to explore the fascinating and disturbing history of child evangelism in America and came across the extraordinary Terry Durham preaching on YouTube. His interest in this subject however goes back to a decade, when he directed two television documentary films for the BBC about child preaching prodigy, 13 year old Shaun Walters. Through his research Morris realised that Shaun was not an isolated ’miracle from God’, but merely one in a long line of child preachers that can be traced back through American history.

‘Children of God’ explores the religious and ethical dilemmas of child ordination and takes the listeners into the extraordinary world of 12-year-old YouTube evangelist Terry Durham. The programme was broadcast a number of times on the BBC World Service with an estimated audience of over 200 million.

“I’m bowled over,” said Morris. “This is a really important award, simply because the competition was so strong and the judges so diverse – there were over 200 entries from filmmakers in over 30 countries, as diverse as Argentina, France, India, UAE and the USA.”

The Association for International Broadcasting awards attract entries from all over the world because they are independent of commercial interest and represent the best of international radio and TV. The awards are renowned for their independent assessment of quality, using external and peer review by respected professionals from the broadcasting and wider media industries.

The judges come from all areas of broadcasting and are drawn from all over the world. The judges this year included Amir Jahangir, CEO, SAMAA TV from Pakistan; Danforth Austin, from ‘Voice of America’, USA; Michael Joseph from Safaricom, Kenya; Billy Wright, the Global Head of Media & Games Partnerships at Nokia and Hanh Tran, Chief Executive of Radio Australia to name a few.

In their citation the judges praised ‘Children of God’ as, "a fascinating and frightening documentary about young preachers that engages the listener from the outset".

This is not the end of the story for Christopher Morris who hopes to return to the US in the near future, to film the third part of his documentary ‘evangelist trilogy’ about the preacher, Shaun Walters.