Mark Playne

Mark Playne is a British writer and filmmaker drawn to the darkest corners of human experience, and stubbornly determined to find the light in them.

In 1992 he came within seconds of becoming one of Colombia’s disappeared. Two decades later his short film Love at First Sight toured five continents, collected seventy-six international awards and was archived by the British Film Institute. He was then chosen as the UK director for an international omnibus film on the Armenian genocide, a century of silence and a million and a half dead. His answer, in the cause of reconciliation, was a science-fiction comedy in the spirit of Chaplin and Monty Python. The film opens with his dedication: “To all the men who have mistaken their brother for their enemy.”

His books follow the same instinct. The MoMo series, about a Moroccan shepherd boy and his duck, is funny and warm and loved by readers from eight to eighty. Read on, and it becomes a story of our times, offering a rare human view of headlines most people only ever see from a distance. 

3 Seconds in Bogotá returns to Colombia, to the near-death and the true story behind the disappearances. Dark material, and somehow, yet again, also funny. 

His research for the website Not on the Beeb asks the questions polite society would rather leave alone, and is now archived by the British Library. AI and I takes that research further.

Whatever the subject, his stories end in the same place: love, empathy, the intelligence of intuition, and the quiet certainty that the seemingly impossible is always possible.