Shane Meadows (1972-) b. Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, England.

Raised in Nottingham England, Shane Meadows dropped out of school as a teenager. After some odd jobs and a shot at studying acting and photography, Meadows volunteered at an art centre and learned the craft of film-making. He borrowed a camcorder and taught himself a technique of making short films with his friends as actors. After producing some numerous shorts, he was approached to direct the TV documentary The Gypsy’s Tale (1995).

Meadows also wrote, produced, directed, edited and co-starred in the 60-minute film Small Time (1996), winner of the Michael Powell award at the 1996 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Meadows was signed up to make the BBC-financed TwentyFourSeven (1997), shot in black and white, the film centred on Bob Hoskins attempts to rescue the disaffected youths of a town by opening a boxing club.

His next film, A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) was a bleak and twisted rites-of-passage story set in the Midlands. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), is Meadows’ comedic homage to the Spaghetti Western genre, in which a man returns to the Midlands to try to win back his ex-girlfriend. While Meadows’ films do not carry the overt political messages of Ken Loach‘s films, they do offer social commentaries on the position of men in contemporary culture. This is England (2006) was Meadows unromantic tale of one boy�s troubled rite of passage during the Falkland War in 1980s� England, and widely regarded to be amongst the directors best efforts to date.

Somers Town (2008) was filmed in London and Paris over a period of only 11 days. Originally conceived as a short film to explore the community around St Pancras Station, the film then blossomed into a feature film. In June 2008 the film showed at the Edinburgh Film Festival where it won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film. Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (2009) premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival this year and is released in October.