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Penelope Jagessar Chaffer
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer is a multi award winning documentary filmmaker. She is the first black, female director to be nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. Born in London, of Trinidadian parentage, she started her career at the BBC in 1992. After 7 years, she moved to Channel 4.

Her first British Academy Award Nomination came for her debut film, “Me and My Dad” which followed Penelope back to Trinidad as she confronted her father, a former high flying magistrate, (the youngest magistrate in the British Commonwealth) who was sent to prison for bribery and corruption. The film for Channel 4 was broadcast in June 2001. She has directed several well-received pieces of work including “Shakespeare’s Stories” for the BBC, which received a BAFTA nomination in 2006.

She has also won over 10 awards for her work with the BBC and Channel 4, including 5 gold national and international Promax awards and is a double BAFTA, Royal Television Society and Grierson (British Documentary Awards) nominee. A documentary auteur, her films display a singularly unique perspective on the world we live in with The Observer newspaper calling her work “a joy to watch.”

Penelope lives in New York with her husband and son.

Current Work: Toxic Baby
A dramatic rise in chronic childhood diseases has been seen across the western world with skyrocketing rates of asthma, developmental disabilities like autism and certain juvenile cancers to name a few, as well as a rise in certain adult onset diseases like testicular cancer which are all being linked to the increasing chemical exposure that we and our babies face. Mother and filmmaker, Penelope Jagessar Chaffer, stumbled across the issue of infant chemical exposure and its implications for the health of our children, back in 2005. Aghast to discover that she could be exposing her young baby to potentially serious ill-health and developmental problems and astonished by her lack of awareness of what is one of the biggest environmental issues facing our society, she embarked on a journey to discover the truth, compelled to try to understand the exposure her young baby faces, not only in the general environment.

“Internal Environmentalism”, the phrase coined by the film Toxic Baby™ to help explain the issue, is shaping up to be one of the most challenging debates we face as a society and in the years spent researching and making this film, the production has had unprecedented access to a wealth of information regarding this topic. The aim of the film and this site is to share that information and to provide the most up to date thinking on the issue, providing a host of downloads and links for a more informed experience of the issue of toxicity and its role in the lives of children in the twenty first century.Three years in the making and filmed across nine time zones, TOXIC BABY™ travels from the Netherlands to North Carolina, from London to both the east and west coasts of America, revealing the debate that is being waged across science and industry. Featuring interviews with doctors, professors, researchers, chemists and industry, the film establishes this issue as one of the most important facing us today. To learn more about the film and filmmaker visit: www.toxicbaby.com

Related articles on the subject of Toxicity:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-10-30-plastics-cover_N.htm http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/04/16/plastics_chemical_may_pose_risk_to_children/ http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/06/04/f-phthalates.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4651391.stm http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0327109520080904 http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0327109520080904 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-566349/Baby-bottle-chemicals-make-children-obese-life-say-scientists.html

Filmography
Me & My Dad, 2001

Bollywood for Beginners, 2002

Additional Work
Shakespeare's Stories

The Death of Television