Peter Speyer

Peter Speyer is a director, screenwriter and playwright. Productions/commissions include: Royal Court (1980, Good Hope, workshop production: Dir Roger Michel); Royal Shakespeare Company (1983, Light Up for Life; 1987, Old Year's Eve; 1991, Anus Mundi); Touring productions include 19885, Getting Plenty and 1986, Something's Burning (Lyric Hammersmith; BBC Open Space). Received commissions from British Screen, UK Film Council and wrote the feature film, The Wooden Camera (Winner, Crystal Bear, Berlin, 2004; Best South African Film, 2004; Tiger Award nomination (Rotterdam) and other international awards). Chicken Talk (Dir: David Farr). As writer/director, his short film You Are Me (2013) played at Berlin, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Geneva, Bucharest, San Diego and UK Jewish Film Festivals, Curzon Soho, South African National Arts Festival, European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, Freud Museum. Current: Developing features as writer/director including Betrayals (Prod: Lucy Wenigerova); post-production on documentary, The Saved (2016, Canada/UK); co-producing two feature films with 2 Pilots: The Mule (2016, Sierra Leonne) and Brothers (2017, Cyprus). For last fifteen years, Peter has been a film consultant/ trainer in film industry in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. As free-lance Associate Director of Arista, he co-ran some forty intensive short and longer-term workshops/ training programs for writers, producers, directors and story/script editors, including mentoring on the both editions of FilmLab (South Australia Film Corporation). He consulted on films such as 52 Tuesdays, Shut Up Little Man, Snowtown inter alia Born in South Africa, Peter has a degree in Psychology and Social Work. He ran theatre workshops in Vrygrond shanty town, South Africa. Coming to UK as exile, he co-directed a therapy centre in London for people with psychotic conditions; then worked therapeutically with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, concentration camp/labor camps inmates, in hiding, child/adult refugees. Also worked with refugees fleeing the war in Bosnia as it unfolded.