Polly Steele

Polly Steele was born in London but grew up all over the world, spending her teenage years in France where she was highly influenced by French cinema. She started her film making career in the innovative department of the BBC making Video Diaries, the first films to be editorially directed by their subjects and which later lead to what we now call Reality TV, "It was here" she quotes "that I learned to break all the rules." She went on to make Tantrums and Tiaras with David Furnish, an intimate portrait of Elton Johns life, one of the first celebrity films of its kind. Polly is an award winning UK based, independent, film-maker renowned for her ability to tell the most compelling and sensitive stories. She has made films for all of the UK's major broadcasters, and produced/developed fiction as MD for Rocket Pictures with Elton John and David Furnish and for her own company In Trust Films. She has spent time creating moving silent video portraits of both celebrities and non celebrities, these were a way of getting beyond the verbal form of communication and finding the essence of our common humanity. Her sitters included the late Tony Benn, Jason Isaacs, Michael K Williams and the late Partick Moore. She wrote and directed Let Me Go starring Juliet Stevenson and Lucy Boynton, with Radioheads Philip Selway composing. It was selected to premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2017 and was released in the UK in 2017, it has won several awards and is distributed worldwide by Red Arrow Int. It was a film that helped her to explore the subject of inherited trauma, and mirrored something in her own life. She is also a mother to three children Josie, Toby and Raffy.