Michael O'Bernicia

Once described as "the Zelig of stand-up comedy", Michael was an irregular on the London circuit from 1991 till 2003 and has performed on bills with award-winning comics such as Lee Evans, Jenny Eclair, Eddie Izard, John Thompson, Bill Bayley, Phil Jupitus, Jerry Sadowitz and Johnny Vegas, among many others. After only 37 gigs, the twenty-two year old comic was recognised by stand-up magazine, The Heckler, as "one to watch for the future". Michael was then a founding member of Screaming Skull Theatre Company, for which he wrote two critically acclaimed stage plays; Nightlights and The Truth Game. Nightlights was described as "a skillful light satire" by TimeOut magazine and had two successful fringe theatre runs in London. The Truth Game was an overnight fringe theatre success. The Guide's Rosemary Furber described it as "An unexpected treasure... hilarious and beautifully constructed". On the final night of the first three-week run at the Birdsnest Theatre in Deptford, London, Michael was approached by an independent film production company to develop the play for the screen. The next eighteen months were spent working with legendary guerrilla filmmakers, Kino-Eye Films, during which time Michael wrote and performed in his British television debut, Little England, which was sold to Channel 4 in July 1996. During the same month, Michael graduated from the acclaimed Dov Simens' 2 Day Film School. Shortly afterwards, Michael left Kino-Eye and set about producing and directing his own screenplays. He also started teaching stand-up comedy at arts centres in London and the south east of England. Over the next five years, his workshops nurtured countless new-act competition winners, one Edinburgh Fringe Best Newcomer and many other full-time, professional comics, including the incomparable, Josie Long. In the bleak early winter of 1998, Michael co-produced and co-directed a fifteen minute short called Roadkill, with scriptwriter, Tony Chamberlain. The film was shot in glorious 35mm in the Breacon Beacons and starred famous Welsh actors Brian Hibbard (The Flying Pickets), Dorian Thomas (Twin Town), Dylis Pryce (Under Milk Wood) and Helen Griffin (Human Traffic), as well as Monty Python veteran, John Scott Martyn. The film screened at several festivals, including Raindance, Leeds, Cardiff and Cannes. It was broadcast twice on Sky Moviemax in 2000, when it was also reviewed in Total Film as "hilarious and beautifully shot". Not long afterwards, Roadkill screened for three months in Welsh cinemas, before the Anthony Hopkins blockbuster, Hanibal. After appearing in Little England, Michael played a leading role in the award-winning short film, Rockin' Chair, as well as making TV cameo appearances in Touching Evil II and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). He was also the face of BBC Talent Search 2002, when he played a temperamental wedding video director, in an infomercial that was specially written for him. 2004 saw the release of The Good Cop, starring Kim Bodnia, Iben Hjejle and Rene Diff. The Danish language action comedy went straight in at number one at the Danish box-office and grossed £1M in its first week in Danish cinemas. Michael was Co-Producer on the movie and his production and sales company, Unspeakably Wicked Pictures [UWP], launched the film at the Cannes Market. Then, in the spring of 2005, Michael's controversial debut feature film, Nefarious, a fast-moving, micro-budget thriller about the hypocrisy of the drugs laws, was shot, guerrilla-style, in London, Amsterdam and the North East of England, in just seventeen days, with a cash budget of £17,000. Despite having originally been completed in 2008, the remastered film will ready for release by the end of 2018, almost fourteen years after it was shot. After changing his professional name from Knighton to O'Bernicia for legal reasons, Michael co-founded development, production and distribution outfit, Anarcho-Film Productions [A-FP]; and has worked from 2009-2018 as producer-writer-director-editor of The Great British Mortgage Swindle, a coruscating documentary feature about institutionalised mortgage fraud and the genocide of eviction, which is also set for UK release in the 3rd quarter of 2018.