Brian Moser

Brian John Moser (30 January 1935 – 16 February 2023) was a British documentary filmmaker who made approx. 40 films between 1963 and 1998, including a television series called Disappearing World for Granada Television. This BAFTA-winning series, which began in 1970 and ran for more than 20 years, told the stories of indigenous peoples under threat from the advance of the outside world, in their own words. Moser was also a documentary-maker for World in Action, a long-running Granada TV current affairs programmes, with his most notable contribution to the series coming with the death of Che Guevara.

Early life and education

Born in London in 1935, the son of Charles (Charlie) Moser, from a family of Bradford wool merchants of German Jewish descent, and his wife, Eliza (née Henderson), a British artist whose family ran an import-export business in Chile. Moser attended school at Glenalmond College, Perth, and completed National Service in the Middle East with the Royal Engineers before gaining a degree in geology from Trinity College, Cambridge. His work as a geologist took place in Colombia and Patagonia, with a spell in Nyasaland before it gained independence as Malawi.

Career

Expeditions to Colombia and initial film making

In 1960-61, he spent two years in Colombia with the anthropologist Donald Tayler, recording the music of eight remote indigenous tribes, the beginning of his enduring fascination with South America, and particularly Colombia. The music was the focus of three short films that they made together, and these were later edited into the documentary Piraparaná. This film caught the attention of the Granada TV programme controller Denis Forman, who decided to invest in the amateur filmmaker, providing training and then hiring him to work as a researcher, then producer, on The World Tomorrow, and as a producer and director of World in Action.