2024 Winner

Lockerbie

Mindhouse Productions, Sky Documentaries

UK

- History & Biography

We could have made a series on the long Lockerbie investigation alone, a ‘twisty-turny’, true crime procedural thriller, but our ambition was to go further than that. We wanted to take a more minimalist approach to the filmmaking, allowing our contributors’ testimony to be at the centre of the series. We wanted the extraordinary set of characters to feel like real, living, breathing people - not merely ciphers for plot points and information. Tim Atack composed a spare, haunting, and beautiful score, because we never wanted that feeling that you needed to have pulsating music under every moment of the film. At key moments the silence was as powerful as some of the testimony. Likewise with the cinematography. The intention was always for the viewers to see the emotional depth of the accounts from the people of the town itself and the relatives of the victims. Voices that are sometimes still angry, traumatised, but that also unexpectedly resonate with kindness and humanity.