Hot Shots 2022: Beya Kabelu

Beya Kabelu struck gold with his directorial debut, The Detective And The Dog Thief, which became the first short film to be backed by Netflix’s Documentary Talent Fund. This was also the first production of Bellwether Pictures, the indie Beya set up after cutting his teeth in development and production at the likes of The Garden, Raw, Rogan Productions and Passion Pictures.

Kabelu started out as a print journalist on The Guardian, The Sun and The Sunday Times, securing his TV break at Sky News, where he became the youngest journalist to produce an exclusive story after gaining access to Europe’s ‘money mule’ fraud networks.

An alumnus of Channel 4’s Alpha Fund and Commissioner Mentoring Network, Beya was nominated by Raw TV creative director Burt Layton as one of The TV Collective’s 50 Breakthrough Leaders in 2021.

Recently, he has been producer/director on Four Kings, a high-end Amazon Prime series from Workerbee that explores the rivalries between British boxers Nigel Benn and Chris Eubank, and Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno. 

The indie’s managing director, Rick Murray, recalls meeting Kabelu as “an ambitious AP, hungry to impress and with an encyclopedic knowledge of the TV industry and a firm grip of trends and the latest creative techniques”.

Murray says he has been struck by Kabelu’s “tenacity, brilliance and eye for a scoop”, and that nothing seems to faze him, from working with Oscar-winning directors and experienced showrunners to negotiating access from big institutions and writing complex doc proposals. “Beya is an intellectual – great at analysing story and brilliant with contributors.”

Shifting gears again, Kabelu has been working with rising comedy star Munya Chawawa on C4 docu-comedy How To Survive A Dictator.