Leading industry veteran Mark Edwards has been appointed Head of Fipadoc Pro, the industry arm of Biarritz-based docfest Fipadoc, whose next edition runs January 22-30 2027. Fipadoc Pro will play out January 25-28.
Edwards will replace former Fipadoc Pro Head Bastien Gauclère, who is moving to Bolivia to oversee French film and audiovisual policy for the Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela).
Mark Edwards biography
A 30-year industry veteran, producer and broadcaster, Edwards began his career in New York working on a series on the history of American cinema. Based in Paris since 1995, he served for four years as Director of the USC Shoah Foundation (founded by Steven Spielberg) in France before working across Europe as an independent producer.
In 2012, he joined ARTE France as Head of International Co-productions. In 2021, he was appointed Director of Documentaries in Europe for Netflix. In his role as a broadcaster, he has served as a commissioning editor on more than a hundred documentary films and series. His credits include blue-chip political series on Obama and Trump by Norma Percy and Brook Lapping (ARTE/BBC), The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (ARTE/PBS/BBC), Exterminate All the Brutes by Raoul Peck (ARTE/HBO) and The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend (L’affaire Bettencourt) by Baptiste Etchegaray and Maxime Bonnet (Netflix).
Among others, he helped develop and fund the award-winning feature documentaries Notes on Blindness by James Spinney & Peter Middleton and The Neighbours (Les enfants du 209, rue St Maur) by Ruth Zylbermann. At ARTE he also helped create Generation Africa, a collection of 25 films from the African continent, and served as executive producer of the feature documentaries Zinder by Aicha Macky and No-U Turn by Ike Nnaebue, awarded at Berlinale Panorama in 2022.
Since his departure from Netflix in 2024, he has returned to working as an independent producer and media consultant. He has extensive experience teaching documentary production and writing (INA, Femis, Lussas), has been a member of several film commissions (CNC, Ciclic), and has served on several festival juries (Leipzig, Sheffield).
