Rosemary Baker is a multi-award-winning documentary Producer Director and visual artist. She cut her teeth directing short films for The One Show, before making the Channel 4 First Cut documentary How to Make It on OnlyFans (“one of the most charming TV moments of 2021” – The Guardian) and the multi-award-winning Random Acts short Lesbian., which won a Celtic Media Award for Best Short Form, as well as being shortlisted for the Broadcast Digital Awards, the RTS Cymru Awards, and the Iris Prize. She has just directed the critically acclaimed documentary Growing Up Jewish for BBC One.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your journey to working in documentaries. Did you always want to work in this industry?
I was never one of those kids who dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. I studied German at university and originally wanted to be a translator or an artist or an academic, until I realised that spending weeks in the library reading and writing on my own made me really lonely. After my Master's I took what was meant to be a "short break” from academia, applied for work experience at the BBC World Service, and discovered radio. It was full of the best of what I loved about studying (diving head-first into research, digging deep to understand other people’s perspectives, working out how to present and explain things engagingly) but in a thrillingly pacy, super-collaborative context. Broadcasting felt magical to me, and I didn't look back.
I got my first TV researcher job a few years later, worked my way up to self-shooting PD, and made it onto the Edinburgh TV Festival’s prestigious Ones to Watch scheme in 2019, which turbocharged my career. I’ve just finished my seventh broadcast doc, Growing Up Jewish, which came out on BBC One in April 2024. Although filmmaking was never the plan, I think what ties my backstory together is a drive to communicate ideas and feelings, and make the world a little better understood.
Q: What do you love about working in film and television?
I’m trying not to turn out a cliché, but I particularly love the way it feels to work in a team of incredibly talented people. The job of a director boils down to generating a creative vision, and transmitting that vision as effectively as possible to the team around you so that they can bring their own creativity to bear in pulling it off. Anyone who works in film and TV will tell you we are nothing without our collaborators. Working in a team where everyone’s contributing their best, and you’re creating something that’s greater than the sum of all of your parts, is for me the most electric of highs.
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
"Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose". This is actually a quote from 2004's Friday Night Lights (but I originally came across it thanks to NBC’s Parks and Recreation). I think about it a lot when I'm at a fork in the road or doubting my convictions. To me it means something like: know what you want, work hard to understand the impact of your decisions, be steered by your values and driven by compassion, and - one way or another - you'll be fine.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced?
As a lesbian the biggest challenge I’ve faced was learning to live authentically. When I was a teenager I carried so much internalised homophobia that I really believed that happy relationships and a rewarding career weren't possible for me. In my twenties I felt like a spider trapped under a glass, watching everyone I knew forging ahead with their lives while I couldn't live mine. Carrying that amount of self-loathing severely limited my worldview and the sense of what I could achieve. It took years to unlearn it, to get better at being curious about myself, and to lean into my difference.
As luck would have it, the world was just starting to change too at around that time: onscreen representation of queer women started to increase, and my concept of who I was and what I could aspire to started to shift. These days I bring all of myself to work, and have sky-high aspirations for where I can go and what I can achieve. Sometimes I have to stop and pinch myself, because the person I am now is beyond the wildest dreams of my teenage self.
Q: What’s next for you?
I’m about to start work on a two-part documentary for a major broadcaster. I'm also continuing to work on long-term feature film developments, with the aim of independently producing my first feature doc.
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