A film director, producer, editor and radio producer with an extensive multi-media background
Legendary Children [All of Them Queer] (UK/Spain 48mins Revelation Films 2025)
As LGBTQIA+ Pride in the UK celebrated its 50th birthday, how did it all begin in the UK, and where is Pride heading? International streaming TV release Jul 2025.
Directed and produced by Rob Falconer, and titled by kind permission of Holly Johnson after his 1994 song, the Pride history and LGBTQIA+ rights documentary LEGENDARY CHILDREN [ALL OF THEM QUEER] explores the extraordinary 1972 arrival of the Pride movement on European soil and the global phenomenon it would become. From the 1970s and the arrival of the Gay Liberation Front, groundbreaking rights pioneers of that time recall a very different and hostile landscape in Britain. By the 1990s Pride grew to the mega parades and huge park festivals, succesively bankrupting themselves. Pride in London, the present day incarnation, sees huge numbers in central London but also provokes powerful controversy in the community over its depoliticised parade promoting corporate sponsors. Features prominent human rights campaigners, LGBTQI+ activists and artists who have shaped the course of LGBTQI+ life over the years, including Peter Tatchell, Angela Mason, Tom Robinson, Neil Bartlett, Ted Brown, Stuart Milk, Andrew Lumsden, Stuart Feather, Nathaniel J Hall and more. Music by Tom Robinson, Tall Houses and SRJ. Captures spectacular footage of both Pride's official July 1st birthday and the supersize Pride in London event. Raucous, off the cuff, firmly connected to our present, and likely not what anyone's been expecting... The film premiered at the KASHISH 2023 LGBT+ film festival staged in India's movie capital Mumbai in June 2023, just as India awaited the landmark Surpreme Court ruling on equal marriage, won a Festival Favourites Audience Award at Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival California, played at Spain's huge Wnter Pride and sof far in UK arthouses at Lighthouse Cinema (Picturehouse) in the South West and Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in London's West End. Acquired for worldwide streaming TV release by Revelation Films for release from July 2025. The title song's music promo The Face by Tall Houses was released in partnership with UK LGBT+ History Month 2025 across Apple Music Video and VEVO.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36961315
Bob: Man of the Angels (Netherlands 2025 BOB The Film Ltd) in production
If The Netherlands is famous for its reputation for tolerance, Bob Angelo is one of the key people who made it so...
Co-produced by Rob Falconer and the late Andrew Lumsden and was the creative swansong of a quietly legendary activist and humanitarian. Andrew was one of the original instigators of Europeean Prides and broke completely new ground founding Gay News newspaper so that "our people could read what we thought and we wrote". Niek Engelschman, AKA Bob Angelo, was a gay, half-Jewish Resistance agent, remaining in Amsterdam throughout the Nazi occupation and even helping others to get out at huge risk. In the post-war 1946 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Niek found his next calling: to ensure history could never repeat itself in The Netherlands. He became a successful Dutch TV actor but all the while, his other identity would create a lasting legacy of extraordinary social transformation... That legacy is about all of us, and one we unexpectedly need to call upon all over again. With music playing a powerfull role, the film will not be a conventional history documentary. (English/Dutch)
Gay Man's Guide to Safer Sex '97 Director's Cut 2024 UK 55mins Pride Video 2024
25 years after its gamechanging debut, the second Gay Man's Guide film returns to sell out the Barbican
Directed and produced by Rob Falconer. The two Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex films were a radical and uncompromising response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, made by gay men to inform and protect gay men when mainstream society was relentlessly looking the other way. On release, both would break completely new ground with the British censor in what was considered permissible in showing gay male sexuality on screen - landmarks which have never really been surpassed. Both films were released and seen all over the world. The second 1997 film, directed, produced and co-presented by Rob Falconer, was the first to look at the lifesaving changes and challenges brought about by the arrival of combination therapy. What nobody knew was that it would stay in distribution for 25 years and turn out to be astonishingly prophetic on what was to come. Barbican Cinema curator Alex Davidson's decision to programme the film in Barbican's 2024 Spring season triggered the making of the 2024 restored and substantially reimagined Director's Cut, which turned out to be far more relevant still to the challenges of living with HIV than anyone had expected. Quickly attracting 45K trailer views a week, the film and its live Barbican ScreenTalk with the makers and original cast members sold out the Barbican main house, returning too to the USA to win an Audience Award at Palm Springs LGBTQ+ Film Festival in California. There is more coming for this unique film too...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36961315
Sleeping Dragon (UK 2024) 12mins
George Hodson was never going to be anyone's conventional documentary subject in a totally surreal big-screen musing on life, loss, sex, pain, HIV, and small dogs...
Written by 'Warrior Queen' the late George Hodson, and directed and produced by Rob Falconer in the last few months of George's remarkable life. Surviving HIV/AIDS for some 45 years, cancer, loss, stigma, alienating family bigotry and racism, for some of the Queer Elder generation like George, triple combination therapy threw a lifeline that also became a lifetime of onward challenge... But George was never going to lie down quietly and had a unique gift for storytelling, and for making one of the toughest subjects become completely universal and human. He didn't live to see the film live on the big screen with its five cinema show audiences so far, like its packed Barbican Cinema debut,in the UK and as far away as India for KASHSIH 2024 in Mumbai. With the stunning music of global synth-rock legend David Sylvian, by his special permission. Latest screening June 2025, UCL Cinema London with a new film on Leigh Bowery for National HIV Stories Trust.
The Fragility of Freedom (UK 20mins) in association with The Dora Love Prize 2024
"An ordinary person can do extraordinary things, if they try and if they act, instead of being a bystander..."
Directed and produced by Rob Falconer. Powerful film about The Dora Love Prize 2024, commemorating the work and ongoing inspiration of Holocaust survivor and educator the late Dora Love, and starring the extraordinary students of participating 2024 schools and colleges in the UK and Canada. Surviving Stutthof Concentration Camp, Dora dedicated her life to ensuring young people would know the truth about the Holocaust. But Dora's real goal was to protect the future, challenging young people to seek out the seeds of oppression and discrimination in their own world and timeline, wherever it may lie. Told in the voices of the young people who take part in the international Dora Love Prize each year, the film is very much a collectively realised project, presented on behalf of the participating 2024 schools and colleges. The young participants involved in the film step up to Dora's challenge with remarkable innovation and powerful, humane clarity. Screened so far at FirstSite Cinema in Essex, with its young school-student cast boldly appearing for Q& A, and at Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in Lnodn's West End with Dora Love Prize founder Professor Rainer Schulze appearing for Q & A. There is yet hope for us ahead...
27000@25: When We Were Boys (UK 2021)
25 years ago in 1996 CRUSAID released 27,000 red balloons at the huge LGBTQIA+ Pride Festival on Clapham Common. Why? With music by Erasure and Jimmy Somerville
Directed and produced by Rob Falconer 27000@25: When We Were Boys turns back the clock to Pride on Clapham Common, 1996, the last but one of the public park mega Prides that would ultimately overwhelm the festival in its historical form. CRUSAID's historic 27,000 balloon release marked the number of people who had died from or were living with HIV and AIDS at that time. The original film "27000" was produced and directed by Rob Falconer, and shown on the Pride main stage on the Common to over 160,000 before the balloon release, with Jimmy Somerville and Holly Johnson performing its musical soundtrack. The film controversially explored the impact of an HIV positive diagnosis on an alarmingly young gay man - based very profoundly on real-life experience. 25 years later, 27000@25: When We Were Boys revisits 1996 with a completely new cut of the film and for the first time showing what happened on Clapham Common that day including BBC TV footage unseen since. Coming out of the grip of the devastating COVID pandemic, where were in the fight against the HIV pandemic that has claimed more than 32 million lives? Jimmy Somerville returned for the 2021 version with a new track scoring the film and was joined this time by multi-million selling masters of synth pop Erasure. New material with It's A Sin star and writer of hit play First Time Nathaniel Hall, diagnosed positive at only 16, brought the story a startling contemporary relevance. Tragically its original young star was no longer here to see again what he had the astonishing courage to do 25 years ago. Streamed worldwide in 7 language adaptations around for Rock The Ribbon World AIDS Day 2022 for 12 days only, exclusively from Erasure's powerful social media platforms, the film went on to become the fourth most viewed World AIDS Day 2022 content anywhere in the world on YouTube, reaching tens of thousands of viewers, despite YouTube's (hastily reversed) attempts to ban its viewing by under 18s. The move to shut young people out of a rare piece of material genuinely addressing youth HIV provoked a storm of protest across social media and international LGBTQI+ press, and high profile voices coming out in support of it, such as Holly Johnson, Peter Tatchell, the All Party House of Commons Parliamentary Committee, and US creator of the gamechanging "U=U Undetectable=Untransmittable" global awareness campaign Bruce Richman. What it revealed was that this highly unusual, moving film very definitely still had a voice 25 years on, and a powerful one.
#ReclaimPride (UK 2021
Watch the initial film of #ReclaimPride here on the Peter Tatchell Foundation YouTube channel. The full version also streamed on the DIVA Magazine YouTube Channel here, alongside feature coverage in the September 2021 issue. 2022 UPDATE: Sections of the #ReclaimPride film were acquired by BBC Studios for inclusion in the major Stephen Daldry/Joe Robertson produced Freedom: 50 Years of Pride feature documentary shown in the UK on Channel 4 TV July 2022 and on VOD on the All4 platform.
Battersea Power Station showreel
Editor and showreel producer of promo reel showcasing the Power Station’s history as a movie and event location.
One of a wide variety of videos I was commissioned to make during a fascinating three years working with iconic London landmark Battersea Power Station, a perenially in-demand film and stills location. I was also its house photographer. For those three years it also become a very successful and busy red carpet event venue, courtesy of the innovative Boiler House Venue, prior to it current major reconstruction.
Legacy work includes
Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex '97
Director, producer, writer. Sequel to the groundbreaking 1992 Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex and one of the first films to examine the unexpected and lifesaving changes brought by just emerging triple combination therapy in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The film challenged the representation of gay sexuality on screen and remains a watershed event in the British Board of Film Classification's history of what was considered permissible, changing the landscape for what would follow on afterwards. Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex '97 premiered on London's South Bank at the National Film Theatre, and was screened in the US, across Europe and Australia with extensive commercial release in UK and USA (still in distribution in the USA). Virgin Retail Number One. Read more on the history of the two GMG films.
(UK 72mins)
Cast included Dr Mike Youle, Aiden Shaw. Made in association with CRUSAID/Terrence Higgins Trust, Star Foundation.
Legacy work includes
Speaking in Riddles
Producer LGBT+ mid 90s London clubland comedy Speaking In Riddles. The film made its debut at the then London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now BFI Flare) at the National Film Theatre, South Bank, London, going on to screen at Frameline in San Francisco and the Turin Lovers Film Festival, before touring the national Netherlands art house circuit and its eventual UK retail releease.
(UK 30mins)
Cast included Leah Seresin, Richard Auckland, Rob Falconer, Ruth Enfield, Winston (House of Handbag), Peter K Ward and many faces from influential London club night Kinky Gerlinky. Written and directed by Mark C. O'Flaherty.
Radio Series: Gilded Vectors of Disease
Editor and radio producer of successful radio series The Gilded Vectors of Disease.
First heard on Resonance RM and iTunes Radio, the eight-part series traversed the world (and literally, through the streaming reach audience it went on to reach) in eight perennial purveyors of disease with THE LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE. An eclectic mixture of discussion, accessible science from internationally respected experts in thier fields, stimulating soundscapes and surprising creative writing from guest writers amd poets ruminating on uncomfortably fascinating pests. The series was also released to retail on CD. “An interesting new series with an interesting name…that’s got to be insect of the year.” – Miranda Sawyer, THE OBSERVER.
Radio Drama: The Tailor Made Man
Directed by Chris Bould
William Haines……Robert Dirks
Louis B. Mayer……Judd Hirsch
Jimmy Shields……James Palm
Carole Lombard……Linda Davidson
Pola Negri……Ann Bryson
Howard Strickling……Lawrence Lambert
Marion Davies……Rebecca Tremain
King Vidor……Richard Waites
Victor Darrow……Graeme Messer
Miss Carey……Elizabeth Blake
Producer……Rob Falconer
The Tailor Made Man tells the extraordinary true story of gay movie star William Haines. A top ten box-office star in Hollywood’s Golden Era, his screen career came to a brutally abrupt end when his true sexuality threatened to make too many waves for MGM. He was all but wiped from cinema history by Louis B. Mayer, reinventing himself as a phenomenally successful furniture and interiors designer. Haines originated "Hollywood Regency" and his historic design legacy remains influential and prolifically copied to this day. Adapted for radio by Claudio Macor from his original stage version, the play was also later adapted into a West End Musical.
With Hollywood movie and Broadway stage star Judd Hirsch as notorious Golden Era studio head Louis B. Mayer. Directed by BAFTA and Montreux Rose award winning feature film and TV director Chris Bould.
Radio Drama: Being At Home With Claude
Directed and produced by Rob Falconer
The world radio premiere of Quebec playwright Rene Daniel Dubois' Being At Home With Claude took a radically different interpretation from its preceding international and London West End stage versions, and feature film adaptation - "...this is by a mile the play of the week" Time Out Critic's Choice. A disturbing gay love story with an ultimately homicidal destination, US actor Antony Edridge played the troubled police inspector, while starring in the London West End stage version of D.M.W. Greer's "Don't ask, don't tell" LGBT military drama Burning Blue.
Also assistant producer on the King's Head Theatre and subsequent London West End stage production of the play. Signed performance producer/adapting director of the play's innovative London West End Sign Language interpreted performance, fully integrating leading stage interpreter Dame Wendy Ebsworth right into the stage action alongside the cast.
(All audio materials, literary works and performances on this page strictly copyright control. Creative Commons usage does not apply.)