How we struck gold! World premier: ‘Changing the Script’

Posted on February 19 2020

A preview of our film commissioned to highlight Cornwall’s new Social Prescribing initiative was shown to the ‘actors’ and post production teams across county at the Plaza Truro on 1 February 2020. Doctors, paients and Surgery team members saw themselves for the first time ‘up big’ in Screen 2 on the silver screen.

This was thanks to The Plaza’s owner, Stuart being willing to donate his and his staff’s time to support our Charity’s work – for which we thank him.

The Premier will be shown as part of our Conference entitled ‘Profit for Patients & Practices’ with an accompanying training programme to help surgeries work in different ways – specifically to relieve our overworked doctors.

In 2012 we ‘found’ Ben Giles in deepest Cornwall where he and Cath his wife had decided to escape metropolitan life, when we were looking to commission a film on Mental Health provision in Cornwall. It was such a success that we asked him again if he would consider coming back from his, now, home in Sheffield to help us in 2019 create a piece that could be used to introduce the new concept of non-medical intervention.

We explained that we had to go out to tender and we saw four locally based film makers and asked for recent works to be shown but none matched his incredible flair and sensitivity and he very kindly decided to make this his ‘once a year’ passion project.

This is about them:
Every year we try to tackle a “let’s give something back to society” passion film project. 2019’s project was the Social Prescribing film for DHC.

Ben’s career as a film-maker began in 1987 and has taken him via a photo assignment in Africa, TV commercials and pop promos for U2, Take That, Oasis and Blur, to landmark international documentaries with David Attenborough and Robert Winston.

He is a voting member on the BAFTA cinema jury and a fellow of the Guild of British Film & TV Editors. He was personally nominated for a BAFTA for the BBC2 drama doc series, “Nuremberg” and was supervising editor on multiple BAFTA, RTS and EMMY award-winning series such as Horizon, Wild Weather, Perfect Disasters, Earth: Power of the Planet and Superhuman. He also managed post production on series 2 of Strictly Come Dancing and was a lead consultant on the BBC’s £100 Million Digital Media Initiative.

Cath joined Matobo Ltd in 2018, after a 20 year career as a Philosophy & Ethics secondary school teacher and Head of Department. Since then, Cath and Ben have grown Matobo into a £Million+ business, training 600K learners in 180 local authorities, housing associations such as the Guiness Partnership, the NHS, the London Mayor’s Office and hundreds of schools, on Information Governance, Cyber Awareness and GDPR.

2020’s passion project sees them returning to -30 degrees C in the Arctic to make the third in a series of films with a team of glaciologists about previously unknown sources of methane in the permafrost.

Ben and Cath have been married for 25 years and have 2 sons, aged 17 and 20.