Creative Team

Mark Playne

Writer

Director

Producer

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Mark Playne is a British filmmaker and author whose work spans award-winning cinema, fiction and memoir.

Long before filmmaking became his profession, travel shaped the stories he would later tell. In 1989, he attempted to hitchhike across the Sahara. When the journey broke down, he spent time living with fishing communities on the coast of West Africa, staying in simple huts and going to sea with local fishermen.

Years later, while living in southern Spain, he encountered the other side of those same waters. Locals spoke of walking their dogs along the beaches in the morning and, on some days, finding the body of someone who had attempted the crossing from Africa. For Playne, those bodies were never simply statistics. He had lived, eaten and fished with people from communities on the other side of the sea.

In 2011, while in Morocco as the Arab Spring unfolded across North Africa, he began developing the screenplay that would eventually become MoMo.

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Filmmaking

Playne’s short film Love at First Sight won 76 international awards and is archived by the British Film Institute. Its success led to his selection as the British director in a multinational feature-film omnibus created as an international peace project around the centenary of the Armenian genocide.

His contribution, the science-fiction comedy 2 by 2, tells the story of two shepherds divided by a border fence and also went on to win international awards.

The film was shot entirely in Turkish.

Playne does not speak Turkish.

Working through interpreters and Turkish collaborators, he directed actors in a language he could not understand, relying instead on performance, rhythm, instinct and the universality of the story.

His filmmaking often returns to the same territory as his writing: borders, displacement, identity, connection and the choices people make when larger forces shape their lives.

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Literary Work

Playne’s writing combines adventure, humour and fable with questions about instinct, opportunity and human connection.

His true-life memoir 3 Seconds in Bogotá draws on his experiences in Colombia, blending danger with dark comedy.

MoMo: The Incredible Adventures of Me, My Duck and a Man Called Wolof grew from the screenplay he began in Morocco in 2011.

The novel follows a young Moroccan boy whose education in money, debt, scarcity, opportunity and human nature gradually leads him towards a life-changing decision.

At its heart is a question Playne had already encountered on both sides of the water separating Africa from Europe: what makes somebody leave everything they know and go?

Written as a contemporary fable for adults and younger readers alike, MoMo uses humour, magical realism and adventure to explore poverty, ambition, migration, friendship and the geographical limits placed upon human potential.

Across film, fiction and memoir, a common thread runs through Playne’s work: an interest in borders, both physical and emotional, and in the human instinct to look beyond them.

His work asks what happens when intuition, imagination and courage become stronger than the limits placed upon us.

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