The BEST episodes directed by Ben Lewis
#1 - Google and the World Brain
Storyville - Season 2013 - Episode 6
Storyville: Documentary which tells the story of the most ambitious project ever conceived on the internet and the people who tried to stop it. In 1937 HG Wells predicted the creation of the 'world brain', a giant global library that contained all human knowledge which would lead to a new form of higher intelligence. 70 years later the realisation of that dream was under way, as Google scanned millions of books for its Google Books website. However, over half those books were still in copyright and authors across the world launched a campaign to stop them, climaxing in a New York courtroom in 2011. This is a film about the dreams, dilemmas and dangers of the internet, set in spectacular locations in China, USA, Europe and Latin America.
#2 - The Great Gangster Film Fraud
Storyville - Season 2016 - Episode 2
Documentary about a bankrupt Jordanian entrepreneur and an unemployed Irish actress who hatch a plan to scam £2.5m off the British taxman by faking the production of a £20m movie. But they are found out, arrested and then bailed. While out on bail, they decide to prove their innocence by actually making a film. They hire a former nightclub bouncer, now a self-made micro-budget gangster film director. In 2011, Paul Knight makes their movie for under £100,000 with a cast of soap and gangster movie stars including Danny Midwinter, Marc Bannerman and Loose Women's Andrea McLean. The film's title is A Landscape of Lies. But the cinematic alibi does not convince the jury when the trial runs in 2013. The producers are convicted of tax fraud and given long sentences. A comic British crime caper and classic heist movie, but in this movie the heist IS the movie.
#3 - Blowing up Paradise
BBC Documentaries - Season 2005 - Episode 2
Ben Lewis (The King of Communism, Art Safari), traces the strange history of French atomic tests in the South Pacific from the 1960s to the 90s - a story of liberty, equality and radioactivity. Thousands of Polynesian islanders were transformed from fishermen into nuclear technicians and Greenpeace activists sailed a tiny yacht into the test zone to end atmospheric testing. The film also shows how a tiny group of Tahitian radicals set up the world's only anti-nuclear resistance cell and how some former test workers from France and Tahiti now suffer from cancers that many believe are linked to fall-out from the tests.
#4 - Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror
BBC Documentaries - Season 2002 - Episode 11