CONVOY TO MOLDOVA

As I became a more mature filmmaker, I began to envy people who were making documentaries off their own back. Their films seemed to be made with more depth and meaning than the kind of work I had been doing which whilst sounding quite glamorous wasn’t really world-changing.

I met a well-known award-winning American filmmaker called Michael Moore in a lift one day at a film festival and asked him how he’d been able to make his own campaigning films. He said simply, “The next time an opportunity comes along don’t spend time writing a proposal and pitching it to try and get a commission, just grab your camera and go!”

Within six months. I was on my way to a beleaguered orphanage in the mountains of Moldova where orphaned girls were dying, at the rate of one a week from sheer cold and neglect.

The project would break me emotionally but ended up being the catalyst for a journey of personal faith which completely changed the course of my life.

And what began as a hunch ‘to go’, turned into an RTS gold award-winning film, which was broadcast by BBC all over the world.

I will never forget getting a letter from an Australian family saying that they had stopped eating their evening meal because the film shocked them so much that they could no longer put food in their mouth.

I wrote a song for the opening travel sequence of the film and recorded it with some friends. The chorus goes “…You’ll never get over the girls of Moldova”. I don’t think we ever have and if you watch it you’ll realise why.