Mark Playne is a British filmmaker, author and independent journalist whose work spans award-winning cinema, literary exploration and investigative reporting.

Long before filmmaking became his profession, travel shaped the stories he would later tell. In 1989, he attempted to hitchhike across the Sahara. When the journey broke down, he spent time living with fishing communities on the coast of West Africa, staying in simple huts and going to sea with local fishermen.

Years later, while living in southern Spain, he encountered the other side of those same waters. Locals spoke of walking their dogs along the beaches in the morning and, depending on the day, finding washed-up drugs or the body of someone who had attempted the crossing from Africa. For Playne, those bodies were never simply statistics. He had lived, eaten and fished with people from communities on the other side of the sea.

In 2011, while in Morocco as the Arab Spring unfolded across North Africa, he began developing the screenplay that would eventually become MoMo.

Filmmaking Career

Playne’s short film Love at First Sight won 76 international awards and is archived by the British Film Institute. Its success led to his selection as the British director in a multinational feature-film omnibus created as an international peace project around the centenary of the Armenian genocide.

His contribution, the science-fiction comedy 2 by 2, tells the story of two shepherds divided by a border fence and also went on to win international awards.

The film was shot entirely in Turkish.

Playne does not speak Turkish.

Working through interpreters and Turkish collaborators, he directed the actors in a language he could not understand, relying on performance, rhythm, instinct and the universality of the story.

Literary Works

Playne’s writing explores intuition, human connection and the forces that shape the choices people make.

His true-life memoir 3 Seconds in Bogotá blends danger and dark comedy in an account of his experiences in Colombia. (AI & I - BOOKS)

MoMo: The Incredible Adventures of Me, My Duck and a Man Called Wolof grew from the screenplay he began in Morocco in 2011. The novel follows a young Moroccan boy whose education in money, debt, scarcity, opportunity and human nature gradually leads him towards a life-changing decision.

At its heart is a question Playne had already encountered on both sides of the water separating Africa from Europe: what makes somebody leave everything they know and go?

Written as a contemporary fable for adults and younger readers alike, MoMo uses humour, magical realism and adventure to explore poverty, ambition, migration, friendship and the geographical limits placed upon human potential.

Investigative Journalism

Under the Not On The Beeb banner, Playne has conducted extensive investigations into the response to COVID-19 since 2020. The site states that its work has been archived by the British Library. (Not On The Beeb)

Despite PayPal defunding, YouTube demonetisation, newsletter restrictions and other forms of platform censorship, the project has continued independently.

AI & I: Cracking the Covid Code develops a different investigative methodology: a forensic dialogue between human intuition and artificial intelligence, using sustained questioning to examine evidence, assumptions and contradictions. (Not On The Beeb)

Across film, fiction, memoir and journalism, a common thread runs through Playne’s work: an interest in borders, both physical and intellectual, and in the human instinct to look beyond them.

His work asks us to trust one of the most underused yet powerful tools we possess: our intuition.

I’d also make Love at First Sight and 2 by 2 clickable to their strongest film-industry pages rather than your own shop. I can find the best BFI/IMDb/festival links for those two and slot them in.