Len Collin

Dr Len Collin

Assistant Professor

Department: Northumbria School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries

Len Collin 255 Len is best known as a screenwriter working on such TV shows as Deception, The Bill, EastEnders, London鈥檚 Burning, Ultimate Force, Casualty and Holby City. He is also the director of the award winning feature film Sanctuary.

Campus Address

Squires 306b

Email Len

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Len's research interests centre on how film can be used as a tool for social change. Utilising mainstream genres to tell stories of social injustice and in particular working in the field of Disability Advocacy.To this Len brings his extensive knowledge of industry practices as a performer, screenwriter, director and producer.

His 2016 feature film debut Sanctuary employed a cast of actors with disabilities to tell the story of Larry, a man with Down's Syndrome and Sophie, a woman with epilepsy and their forbiden love story. The film was workshopped and designed around the actors from Blue Teapot Theatre Company in Galway, based on the play of the same name which was written by Christian O'Reilly and Directed by Petal Pilley. Len worked with Christian on the film script and included workshop input from the actors - the result is a film that won critical acclaim from critics and audiences alike and has been screened around the world.

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A chapter in the book Disability and Dissensus: Strategies of Disability Representation and Inclusion in Contemporary Culture. Edited by Katarzyna Ojrzynska and Maciej Wieczorek. called Shooting Actors who Have Intellectual Disabilities: A Reflexive Analysis on the making of the Feature Film Sanctuary was written by Collin and Published by Brill in September 2020.

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A feature Documentary Altered Thinking: An acdemic Essay on Film (2020) took this analysis further by contextualising the industry approach to on screen representations of disability and the methodologies used by Collin in the making of Sanctuary and a call out to the industry to embrace authentic Casting and more authentic representations of disability.

Collin is currently in development on the film Iron Harvest, which explores themes around male sexuality from a queer perspective. Based on his original theatre play Box from 1992. The story has been updated and researched to provide a modern telling of the story of four men who dared to love another man. Set at the time of the first world war and in the present day.

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