Ben Lewin

Ben Lewin's work as a writer and director includes award-winning documentaries, feature films, TV movies, mini-series, and episodic programs. He began at BBC Television as a director on the Nationwide program, followed by other documentary and current affairs programs for Thames, Granada, and Channel Four Television. His breakthrough project as a writer/director was The Case of Cruelty to Prawns, a comedy-drama that won the Best Television Film Award at the Melbourne Film Festival. He also directed Georgia, starring Judy Davis, which won eight Australian Film Institute nominations, The Dunera Boys starring Bob Hoskins, the award-winning Matter of Convenience, and Plead Guilty, Get a Bond about a tribal aboriginal woman and her conflict with the Australian legal system.

Ben Lewin is best known in the US as the writer and director of comedy features; Paperback Romance, a love story about slightly damaged people starring Anthony LaPaglia and Gia Carides, and the messianic farce The Favor, the Watch and the Very Big Fish, starring Bob Hoskins, Jeff Goldblum and Natasha Richardson. His film Hollywood Gold is a documentary of his misadventures in the Beverly Hills jewelry trade.

Lewin directed the award-winning feature film The Sessions, a true-life story based on the sexual awakening of Berkeley-based poet and journalist Mark O'Brien who spent most of his life in an iron lung. Starring Oscar nominees John Hawkes and William H. Macy, and Oscar winner Helen Hunt, the film won numerous international awards including Audience Awards at the 2012 Sundance, San Sebastian and Mill Valley Film Festivals, as well as a 2012 Sundance Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast.