(15 May 1969 - 31 July 2023)
The British executive producer Jess Search may not have been widely known in the everyday lives of most cinemagoers, but she was, however, extremely influential in the world of independent documentary film-making. Sadly she has died from brain cancer at the early age of 54. It was Jess Search who co-founded Doc Society, the non-profit organisation that encourages and sponsors films on important global issues and in so doing also celebrates the documentary movement for the difference it can make.
Jess Search was born in Waterlooville, Hampshire to businessman Phil Search and his wife Henrietta, but she grew up in Sevenoaks in Kent, attended Tonbridge and Sevenoaks Schools, went on to the Cass (now the Bayes) Business School in the University of London, and then New College, Oxford, majoring in philosophy, politics and economics. Her father died in a car crash when Jess was 18. She first worked with her uncle, Tony Laryea, the black executive who, with his company Catalyst TV, founded Open Door, the first BBC programme for marginalised groups that gave carte blanche to any organisation with a valid social point to make. Jess then went to work for Channel 4's Independent Film and TV Unit and while there also created, with some of her film-making friends, Shooting People, an organisation that connects film-makers with writers, directors, producers, actors, editors and composers and also offers other sorts of support.
When Channel 4 closed its Independent Film and TV Department in 2004 she persuaded her friends and colleagues to form BritDoc which subsequently became Doc Society. In its time and to date Doc Society has been behind over five hundred teams of film-makers from all over the world. From 2017 it became the British Film Institute's delegate partner for the BFI Documentary Film Fund. In her time Jess Search developed Good Pitch which unites groups over fifteen countries to share their ideas and ambitions. She worked tirelessly for Doc Society and other organisations and became involved in Kickstarter and the Institute for Public Policy Research and also became a trustee for Marie Stopes International, where her mother had once worked.
Among some of the documentary films supported by Doc Society are The Look of Silence, a film about Indonesian genocide; The Square, which covered the problems faced by a Swedish museum curator; Hooligan Sparrow, about sexual abuse of girls in China; Virunga, on the fight to save a national park in the Congo; Cow, Andrea Arnold's film that premiered at Cannes, and Citizenfour on the Edward Snowden spy scandal, which won the Oscar for best documentary. However, in her own time, she executive produced some 40 films, and she leaves the film world with a massive legacy. Doc Society will continue with the work which she so bravely instigated. Jess Search married her partner Beadie Finzi in 2018 and the two women brought up two children, Ella and Ben.
MICHAEL DARVELL
