Alex Thomas

Alex Thomas’s start in documentaries was unorthodox, accidental even. Having studied architecture at university, he was helping build a school in Columbia when he became fascinated with the local power dynamic between the cartels and extreme left-wing rebels and started documenting it. Impressed by his footage, Unicef contacted him to employ Alex to film other stories across South America, Africa and Asia. Soon, he was working as a multimedia journalist for the likes of Save the Children, Amnesty, Associated Press and the Guardian and filming for the likes of Panorama, Dispatches and The Rap Game UK, among others. His first production commissioned for his own company, Milk First, was a much more personal project – Yorkshire Cop: Police, Racism and Me (2021) documented the life of his father, Bill, the first black police officer to serve in South Yorkshire. Following this incredible personal work, Alex was headhunted to direct Britain’s Secret War Babies (2022) for Channel 4, released to critical acclaim from audience and industry alike. Alex was recently named in Broadcast Now’s Hot Shots 2022 list.

In his own words:

“Making my dad’s film, I realised that my family just naturally gravitates towards trying to help people. My dad was in the police, my mum was a nurse and my sister teaches neurodiverse children. I don’t know whether it’s subconscious or innate but that’s where we gravitated. Even when I was doing architecture, it wasn’t for affordable housing that is out of reach for most people, it was to help people who were struggling…

“It’s all about themes. When I was a multimedia journalist, I was channelling this into my work – being a vehicle for change, social inclusion, better representation. I took that and put it on TV, whether in front of the camera or behind. I’ve just done a BBC2 film with Afua Hirsch in South Africa and I insisted we use a diverse crew from the continent. We have true diversity through the production; a microcosm of the world that we live in is in the actual production…

“I believe you don’t really learn anything from having two like minds with the same life experience. You learn so much more from people with a different perspective and life experience. I want to put that in front of the camera, behind the camera, and in everything that I do.”

Alex’s Breakthrough credit is television documentary Yorkshire Cop: Police, Racism and Me