James Miller

James Miller started working as a freelance cameraman, and in 1995 joined the Frontline News collective, as cameraman, producer, and director in most of the world's hotspots. His first film for Hardcash Productions came four years later. A forensic examination of a massacre in Kosovo, the film won the Royal Television Society (RTS) award for international current affairs in 2000. Almost every film he made for Hardcash won major awards. Outstanding work followed. There was a film about Chechnya, Dying For The President, and Children Of The Secret State, about Korea, both for Channel Four's Dispatches in 2000. Then he teamed up with reporter Saira Shah and producer Cassian Harrison to make Beneath the Veil (2001), which changed the way the world understood Taliban-run Afghanistan. Miller was no psyched-up bullet-chaser, but someone who knew the risks and was sensible in evaluating danger. His courage was never more evident than in the making of his second film in Afghanistan, Unholy War (2001). At the height of the Afghan war, he and Shah almost died while crossing the Hindu Kush in sub-zero temperatures. The film won Miller his first Emmy as a director, and also the prestigious Peabody Award - television's equivalent of the Pulitzer - given in 2002. He then went on to make his most famous film - Death in Gaza (2004), which won a BAFTA. Sadly it was his last, as he was killed during the making of the film. He is survived by his mother and father, his wife Sophie and their two children, Alexander, two, and Charlotte, five months.