An impressive career in films
Chloe Fairweather, from Abermule in Powys, is an award-winning director who specialises in observational documentaries and complex true stories.
As a teenager, Chloe won a scholarship to Atlantic College in llantwit Major, Vale of Glamorgan, and later completed a degree in drama at Bristol.
After that, she ran a theatre company with friends in Bristol and then found a job with BBC Wales as a researcher on the X-Ray TV programme, which fights for consumers’ rights.
“It was initially to pay the rent, but I really liked it,” Chloe says about her time working at BBC Wales. “It was around 2007 or 2008. I wasn’t there for that long but it gave me a taste of that type of work.
“I was excited by documentaries in essence and here was a platform where you could reach a lot of people, whereas we were working making theatre and showing to small groups of people.”
She was then accepted on to the highlycompetitive BBC Production Training Scheme: “That was a brilliant opportunity and meant I could work in lots of different areas and it helped massively,” she says.
From here, Chloe learned her craft assisting documentary directors such as award-winning filmmaker olly lambert. her first film, Mr Alzheimer’s And Me, was shortlisted for the Grierson Best Newcomer Award and was nominated for a Bafta.
Now aged 37 and living in london, she has made films for all the major British broadcasters, tackling big issues through intimately-shot stories.
her award-winning film Dying To Divorce was the UK’s official oscar entry for Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary. It also made the 2022 Bafta longlist.
Chloe has just finished filming a series for Sky which is yet to be shown.
“I was working on that with another director,” Chloe says. “It’s about abuse within the modelling industry over a 14-year period. We’ve been working with a Guardian journalist who’s done a three-year investigation into abuse and the quality of the investigation is really impressive.
“It’s been really great to work on that type of project, to have a proper engagement with a subject. The material is very powerful.”
Beyond that, she’s working again with Sinead Kirwan, who produced Dying To Divorce: “We’re developing a new idea that’s exciting and we’re in the very early stages,” she says.
became pregnant and gave birth to daughter Maia during filming and witnessed the aftermath of Turkey’s attempted political coup in 2016, which saw more than 250 people killed in one night. Were there times when Chloe felt threatened? “After the attempted coup, the situation in Turkey changed dramatically,” she replies. “Under the state of emergency, the police had new powers and lots of journalists from inside and outside Turkey were being arrested.
“And then, at the same time, there were terrorist attacks, both of which were definite risks. The terrorist attacks were very intense in 2016 and it was the case that I would fly out of the airport and the next day it would be bombed.
“But you can’t do anything about that type of risk, really, because you don’t know when it’s going to happen. So, a lot of it was a lot of preparing and thinking about it, but when I was there it didn’t feel particularly dangerous.”