Mark Poole is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. His film Fearless about Julia Britton, the playwright who at the age of 92 decided to go to London to put on a play, screened a number of times on Australian public broadcaster the ABC, the last screening in March 2010.
He co-wrote the book Shining a Light: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute (2008) with Professor Lisa French, Dean of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Shining a Light was also published as an iPad application.
Mark wrote and directed the film India Rising (2008) shot and produced in India, about the changes to Indian life and culture being produced by the nation’s rise in economic power and its links to Western economies.
Mark was the director and editor of the half hour documentary Autism – The Early Signs (1989) , produced and written by Hardy Stow and screened on the ABC. He produced and directed the follow-up half hour documentary, Autism – The Teen Years (2003), which was also screened on the ABC. Now he is making We All Have Autism, focussing on the life of Aaron, who was diagnosed with autism when he was four years old.
Mark worked at the ABC TV in Melbourne in the 1990s, producing, directing and series producing such documentary series as Everybody’s Business, a twelve part series on management, Aboriginal Australia, a twelve part series on indigenous history, and Connections, a three part series on information technology.
He has made a film Birth of a Film Festival (2003), about the birth of the Melbourne International Film Festival at Olinda, Melbourne, in 1952.
An accomplished screenwriter, from 2005 until 2012 Mark was the Chair of the Australian Writers’ Guild in Victoria, during which time membership in the organisation increased by 30%.
Mark’s film Basically Speaking (1990), written by Philip Moreland, won the prestigious Certificate of Merit Award at the St Kilda Film Festival. Mark has won an AWGIE Award nominations for the feature film Below the Belt and the television drama Pumped Up, and was awarded the Richard Lane Award at the 2008 AWGIEs. The feature film he wrote A Single Life (1987) also won an AFI Award.
Other documentaries Mark has worked on as a writer, script editor or advisor include Return to Gaza (2010), Trapped (2011), Besieged – The Ned Kelly Story (2006), and Hope Street (1987).