Biography
Rex Bloomstein was born in Devon in 1942 and started out as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC. In 1970, he helmed the direct cinema series "All in a Day", which focused on everyday life in Britain. One of his recurring topics became the justice system and the realities of prison life, portrayed in films such as "The Sentence", "Kids Behind Bars" and "Strangeways", which won two British Academy Awards.
Bloomstein also focused on historical themes, and especially the Holocaust became an important topic of his work. In "Auschwitz and the Allies" (1982), he investigated to which extent the Allies knew about the genocide in the German death camps. The three-part documentary "The Longest Hatred" (1993), which was aired in over 20 countries, explored the repercussions of everyday racism. And the multi-award winning "KZ" (2006), revisited the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen and the long shadow it still casts on the town and its inhabitants today.
Many of his films, like "Roots of Evil" (1997) or "Human Rights, Human Wrongs" (1999), depict the violation of human rights throughout the world. In 2010, Rex Bloomstein completed "This Prison Where I Live", in which he and German comedian Michael Mittermeier portray the incarcerated Burmese comic Zarganar.