Jemma Jupp

​As a filmmaker

 

 

I have always been interested in people and found making documentary films extremely rewarding. I was lucky enough to be sent on many foreign shoots and to work on award-winning productions.

 

Having graduated with a degree in Russian from Exeter University, my first job in television was to work alongside the Russian director on Granada's new version of 7UP in the USSR. It was a huge undertaking and took almost a year to complete including the edit in Manchester.  

 

Then Granada expanded 7UP to South Africa and I was sent off to Johannesburg in 1992. Still under Apartheid rule, the seven-year-olds I met in South Africa still attended segregated schools.

 

I am committed to the South African 7UP project and am trying to find the funding through philanthropists and foundations to film 42UP South Africa (due to film in 2027).

 

I feel very strongly that these stories that we have been filming through historic change in South Africa are important to preserve, share and continue. The films have been described as "a tool for empathy" and it seems to me that more empathy could be very useful in such a divided country. Many people seeing the films, even South Africans, are taken aback by the broad range of life experience that these films depict.

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