Leo Leigh

Leo Leigh studied Film & Fine Art at The Surrey Institute of Art & Design. Having been kicked out in the second year, he started to shoot his friends documentaries and soon started working on his own films. His first short documentary was ‘Ted’, shot in 2004, about his neighbour who lived in a half way home for the mentally ill. In 2006 he made ‘Loony in the Woods’, a video nasty spoof horror movie shot on VHS for New York cult film distributors Troma. In 2008 he started work for Vice Films where he met Andy Capper and made three films under the Rule Britannia series , ‘Blackpool Las Vegas of the North’, ‘Swansea Love Story’ and ‘Beautiful Liverpool’. ‘Swansea Love Story’, a film about the heroin epidemic shot in 2009 was picked up by CNN and was widely covered in the media.

From 2010 – 2011 Leo worked at the ICA as part of an art collective that he set up called Free Shit Salt Grit where he made the film ‘Morris Vs Rave’. In that year he also started work for Udox and set up Spine TV with Leo Marks. Whilst at Spine TV he directed over 20 films also making The City Series a series of documentaries shot in Berlin, Tokyo, and New York. It was in New York that he met Marty Reisman an 83 year old table tennis champion which lead him to go on to make the feature length documentary, ‘Fact or Fiction: The Life and Times of a Ping Pong Hustler’. In 2013 he directed ‘Untitled 13’, The making of Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner which he finished in 2014, but was never released due to legal reasons.

He was signed to Somesuch & Co in 2015 and has written and directed two films, Bafta nominated ‘Mother’, commissioned by Super Deluxe, and ‘Sometimes Chinese’, commissioned by Channel 4.