1969-05-15

JESS SEARCH, born on this date (d: 2023), was a producer on dozens of important documentaries and a catalyst on many more as one of the directors of Doc Society, a nonprofit organization she helped found in 2005 that supports documentary filmmakers,

Search was born on in Waterlooville, near Portsmouth along England’s southern coast, to Phil and Henrietta Search. She grew up in Sevenoaks, southeast of London, and attended Tonbridge Grammar School before earning a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. In 2008, she added a master’s degree from Cass (now Bayes) Business School.

 

An uncle working in television hired her as his assistant. That led to a job as a commissioning editor for independent film and video at Britain’s Channel 4, which at the time was programming a wide variety of documentaries. In the BFI interview, she expressed a particular fondness for “the Box,” a cardboard box where unsolicited films and ideas for films were collected.

“This box was full of amazing, crazy stuff that people just sent in to us,” she recalled in the interview. The channel programmed mainstream documentaries as well, she said, but the Box provided “that sense that anything might happen, that anything might be in there, and you might hear from anyone around the world with something to say.”

In 1998, Search was one of the founders of Shooting People, a networking organization for people in the documentary world. In late 2004, Channel 4 shut down its independent film and video department, prompting her and others to start what became Doc Society.

Search had been a central figure in the documentary scene in Britain and beyond for years. She was a producer or executive producer on some of those films, like Matthew Barbato’s Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother, about a sex reassignment surgery, and Agniia Galdanova’s Queendom, which was released earlier in 2023 and is about a queer Russian performance artist.

 
Her family and colleagues said she was even more devoted to her work at Doc Society, which she led with several other directors. It describes itself as “committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally.” Since its founding, the group has backed hundreds of documentary projects, supporting emerging filmmakers financially and with expert input.
 
Laura Poitras’s award-winning Citizenfour had support from Doc Society, which at the time was called the Britdoc Foundation. (The name changed in 2017 to better reflect the organization’s global focus.) So did While We Watched, about the travails of independent television journalism in India, on which Search is credited as an executive producer. Vinay Shukla, its director, called Search “ragingly courageous and resolutely funny.”
 

Search died on July 31 in London. She was 54 and is survived by her wife, the producer and director Beadie Finzi, and their children, Ella Wilson and Ben Wilson.

Doc Society said in a statement that the death, in a hospital, was caused by brain cancer. Search had announced that she was stepping away from the organization because of her illness.