Film-maker known for his hard-hitting documentaries
Roger Graef 1936-2022
Roger Graef, who has died aged 85, was a theatre director and film-maker known for his hard-hitting, fly-on-the-wall documentaries about crime and punishment. His Bafta Award-winning series Police (1982), which included scenes of investigating officers bullying a young woman who claimed to have been gang raped, changed attitudes and influenced policy. But in his six-decades-long career, Graef highlighted all sorts of issues, said The Guardian, from the treatment of children in care and the plight of ex-offenders, to the destruction of Grade II-listed buildings. “All I ever wanted to do all the way through was make a difference,” he said.
Roger Graef was born in 1936, the son of a New York doctor with a Park Avenue practice, and educated at private schools in New York and Vermont. His original ambition was to become a civil rights lawyer, but at Harvard he spent most of his time directing student theatrical productions. After graduating, he worked at the Actors Studio in New York. He’d always felt at home in England, however, and in 1962 he moved over permanently. In London, he directed plays at the Royal Court and in the West End, then shifted into TV, deciding that it would be a better medium for bringing about social change. For his 1972 series The Space Between Words, he examined everything from an industrial dispute at a factory in Dorset to the dynamics of a troubled London family, said The Daily Telegraph. He’d shoot up to 33 hours of film for each 60-minute episode. Yet he managed to make “the cameras so unobtrusive that the participants seemed totally oblivious to them”. His other early films included 1965’s One of them is Brett, about Thalidomide children, and Inside the Brussels HQ, an investigation of the workings of the European Commission. Twelve million people tuned into
Police, which followed the work of the Thames Valley force, and Margaret Thatcher was among the many who were shocked by the episode that focused on rape investigations. “It was not the way to behave,” she told Parliament.
A genial, generous man, Graef had many interests outside filmmaking. He was involved with Prisoners Abroad, sat on the board of the Complicité theatre group and was a visiting professor of media and communications at Oxford University. One of his last tweets, sent in February, was in response to Dominic Raab’s plan to build 4,000 new prison places in England and Wales. “What a tragic ambition,” he commented. He is survived by his second wife, Susan Richards, and his two children.