Mark Kidel Films was established in 2022, 20 years after the creation of Mark’s original company Calliope Media. The company had produced award-winning documentaries – mainly in the arts - and Mark has always worked in collaboration with co-producers in France and Germany.

The company office is based in Bristol, UK. Mark is recognised as one of the world’s leading documentary film makers on the arts and music.  He works mainly in the UK, France, Germany and the USA. His work is regularly selected in leading international festivals as well as honoured worldwide. Recent films include a feature doc about Cary Grant (Becoming Cary Grant, Official Selection Cannes), a film about Englishness with the writer Martin Amis and a portrait of the British sculptor Bridget McCrum.

He was a founding producer of the BBC2 series ARENA (1976), and has made films about visual artists Derek Jarman, Balthus, Brian Clarke, Bill Viola and Fabienne Verdier and architect Norman Foster. Mark has also made films about British rock star Elvis Costello, pianists Alfred Brendel, and Leon Fleisher the Bristol hip-hop musician Tricky, left-field rock musician and composer Robert Wyatt, Boy George, Rod Stewart, choreographer Karole Armitage, the 20th century composers Varèse and Xenakis, as well as a collaboration with Artangel around a commission of a new work by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli.

He has also made a number of films on African music, a highly original series on architecture and symbolism with writer James Hillman (with films on The Door, The Staircase, The Window, The Tower and The Bridge) as well as film essays on melancholia and the heart as imagined by science and in poetry.

Current projects in development include “HIGH”, an ambitious series on popular music and drugs, a feature documentary about the 40 year-long romantic relationship between Alberto Giacometti and the British artist Isabel Rawsthorne, a documentary about the actor George Clooney, and a number of films about musicians and artists.

Mark has also written widely about music, was the first rock critic of the New Statesman, and is currently a regular contributor to the Arts Desk. He was a co-founder with Peter Gabriel of WOMAD, the world music festival.