Gareth Jones (director)

Gareth Jones is a British film and television director and screenwriter. He is the owner and joint CEO, with Fiona Howe, of the independent production company Scenario Films.

Early life and education
Gareth Jones was born in London, son of the BBC Foreign Correspondent Ivor Jones and Jane Ann Sterndale Bennett. He is the grandson of the actress Athene Seyler and great-great-grandson of the composer William Sterndale Bennett.

He was educated at Westminster School and St John's College, Cambridge where he read modern languages. After graduation in 1973, he trained for a year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

In 2011 he was awarded his PhD from Cambridge University for his thesis Rites of Recuperation: Film and the Holocaust in Germany and the Balkans.

1970s–1980s
Jones first joined Prospect Theatre Company, where he worked with Kenny McBain, directing Shakespeare, Brecht, Strindberg, and Chekhov.

He was director of productions at the bilingual Welsh/English touring company Theatr yr Ymylon. Betweeh 1977 and 1980, he worked as a freelance theatre director for the Royal Court Theatre with Stuart Burge, and for Theatr Clwyd, where he directed his own plays My People (based on the short stories of Caradoc Evans) and Solidarity During the 1980s he published two novels, Lord of Misrule and Noble Savage. After training as a television director at HTV Wales, he joined Granada Television at the invitation of producer Bill Podmore. There, he directed Coronation Street and the comedy drama series Brass, starring Timothy West, Caroline Blakiston and Barbara Ewing, the second series of which he also produced.

From 1984 to 1987, he worked as a freelance writer/director for BBC television drama. He wrote the series Fighting Back, starring Hazel O'Connor, and the five-part drama Shalom Salaam, a Jewish-Muslim love story starring Mamta Kaash, Toby Rolt, Ayub Khan-Din and Charlotte Cornwell, which he also directed.

Jones' other television directing credits include The Trial of Klaus Barbie (1987), which was based on court transcripts and screened shortly after the verdict of the Gestapo leader's trial; Watch with Mother and Seeing in the Dark for BBC Drama; and Seduction – Tell Me More for Channel 4, for which he also shot and co-wrote the three-part documentary Born of the One Father (Au Nom du Même Père) in 1980–81.

1990s–present
Jones has worked as a screenwriter in Europe, where his credits include television movies such as Forbidden Zone (Verbotene Zone, 1995) and Not Without You (Nicht Ohne Dich, 2001) for German broadcaster ZDF, The Gift of Life (Un Cadeau: la Vie) for France 2,  Joseph, Mary Magdalen, Thomas and Saul of Tarsus for Mediaset in Italy, and the award-winning feature film Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace (2000), starring Ulrich Tukur.

Since 2007, he has run the feature film development initiative Babylon. This aims to promote cultural diversity within the independent film sector in Europe, and to provide an international platform for emerging filmmakers.

Jones wrote and directed a trilogy of feature films known collectively as the D-Trilogy, Desire (2009),  Delight (2013) and Delirium (2016). Delight was screened at the 35th Moscow International Film Festival and at the Wales One World Film Festival.