Hot Shots 2022: Alex Thomas

“You know an ‘Alex’ moment when you’re in the edit watching rushes,” says Naked creative director Tom O’Brien. “He always brings an idiosyncratic manner to his content and it’s noticeable on screen. He has that genuine curiosity and derring-do that you need to make compelling films – and he shoots beautifully.”

That curiosity was forged in an earlier career as an architect, when Thomas picked up a camera during construction of a school in rebel-controlled Columbia and handed it to the community to share their story. Soon, he was covering stories across the world for Unicef, Save the Children, The New York Times and The Guardian, which led to undercover reports for Panorama and Dispatches.

From his directorial debut, BBC3’s Stacey Dooley Investigates: Kids Selling Drugs Online, he has helmed the likes of BBC2’s Who Are You Calling Fat? and BBC3’s The Rap Game UK, as well as two of the five short films in C4’s Take Your Knee Off My Neck series.

But it was by looking inwards that Thomas came to most people’s attention. In C4’s Yorkshire Cop: Police, Racism And Me, he told the story of his father, the first black officer in South Yorkshire. This was the first commission for his own indie, Milk First, which was backed by C4’s Indie Accelerator programme; his second, Britain’s Secret War Babies, was co-produced with Wall to Wall to huge acclaim.

He has now teamed up with Afua Hirsch to showcase the popular culture of modern Africa in Clear Story’s BBC2 series African Renaissance (w/t), further demonstrating his eye for difficult access and character-driven series with a rigorous journalistic backbone.

Selected as one of The TV Collective/Fremantle’s Breakthrough Leaders, Thomas is paying it forward by teaming up with C4 and We Are Parable to mentor emerging film-makers.