Being a Creative Outsider with 1 GIANT LEAP Director Duncan Bridgeman

Guest Bio

Duncan Bridgeman is the director of 1 Giant Leap, 1 Giant Leap 2: What about Me, and Hecho in Mexico. Upon discovering his “inner hippie” many years ago, Duncan Bridgeman left a successful career in music production to challenge musical convention introduce a new artistic medium altogether to his work: film. Bridgeman joined forces with Jamie Catto, from the electronica band Faithless, to create the multimedia project “1 Giant Leap.” True to their name, the pair traveled to over 20 countries, where they shot film of musical performances and interviews that eventually would be interwoven into 1 Giant Leap, released in 2002 as both a film and an album (the work received two Grammy nominations). What About Me? followed in 2009. In both works, Bridgeman and Catto built from the music up, trading in the narrative structure typically employed in documentary film — a form often intended to instruct — for the language of music: fluid, abstract, evocative, at times mercurial. Bridgeman again uses music as the chief vocabulary in Hecho én Mexico (“Made in Mexico”), an energetic depiction of a country that is universal in its spectacular specificity.