Roger Graef OBE is CEO of Films of Record, a high end documentary company he founded in 1979.  He is an award winning filmmaker, criminologist, and writer. He is best known for his unstaged observational films in normally closed places like board rooms, ministries, prisons, probation, family therapy, special schools, and social work. His films have influenced policing and criminal justice policy. 

He has been a mentor at six Crossover workshops on how to use new media, and was Exec of web lives, the first online doc series for itv.com. Most recently he Exec Produced CERNpeople, a series of fifteen short films for google+ and youtube about particle physics. He is now the Chair of Crossover.

As a director, his many films include the Bafta winning Police series, Police 2001, Is this the Way to Save Our Cities?, Turning the Screws, and The Secret Policeman’s Ball and several other Amnesty comedies.

He is Executive Producer of many films, including Kim Longinotto’s award winning Hold Me Tight Let Me Go, The Truth About Crime and Brian Hill’s Bafta winning Feltham Sings, the Grierson award winning Requiem for Detroit? directed by Julien Temple, Panorama Special: Kids In Care, which won an RTS Award, and Storyville: The Trouble with Pirates.

As a writer, he contributes to many newspapers and is the author of Talking Blues: police in their own words, Living Dangerously: young offenders in their own words, and Why Restorative Justice? 

In 2004 he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement. In 2006 he was given an OBE. He was a founding board member of Channel Four, a board member of the BFI, London Transport, and the ICA. He was Visiting Professor of Media and Communications at Oxford University, and is now Visiting Professor at the LSE and Bournemouth University. Since 1999 he has been an Independent Advisor to the Met Police on race, a subject about which he has made many films. He has been Chair of the theatre company Complicite for twenty years, and advisor to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation on social justice matters for more than a decade. He is currently a member of the RIBA Commission on the Future of Homes.