The producer of feature documentaries “Pussy Riot: a Punk Prayer” and “Afghan Star” has aligned itself with Nutopia, the factual company run by former BBC and Discovery executive Jane Root.
Roast Beef is run by Mike Lerner and its credits include Oscar nominated films “Hell and Back Again,” Egyptian revolution film “The Square,” as well as “The Russian Woodpecker,” which scooped the Grand Jury Awards at Sundance in 2015.
The partners said that joining forces will creation of a factual producer working across features, TV, shortform and digital projects.
Root was the controller of BBC Two and president of the Discovery Network before creating Nutopia in 2009.
Its best-known project is “America: the Story of US” for the History channel in the U.S. Its upcoming documentaries include “Civilisations” for the BBC and PBS, and, in association with Darren Aronofsky, “Strange Rock” for the National Geographic Channel.
“After eight years of pioneering the mega-doc, and bringing new scale and ambition to the factual documentary space, I can’t wait to join forces with these world-leading documentarians to create a whole new range of highly ambitious premium documentary projects,” Root said.
