Foundation Year Student Jonathan Stedall
Posted on Thu, Jun 04, 2009
On leaving Emerson College in 1967, Jonathan returned to the BBC where he then worked, first in London and then in Bristol, until 1990. Since then he has been a freelance producer/director. He married in 1981 and has a son and daughter in their mid-twenties. He is also an Emerson Trustee.
His first films, after completing the Foundation Year at Emerson, were about the Camphill School in Aberdeen and Botton Village in Yorkshire ('In Need of Special Care' won the 1968 British Film Academy Documentary Award). Over the years he continued to make other films about Camphill's work, including 'In Defence of the Stork' with Dr Thomas Weihs, and a three-part series in 1989 - 'Candle on the Hill' - to celebrate Camphill's 50th anniversary.
During his forty-year career Jonathan has also made a number of biographical documentaries - on Carl Jung with Laurens van der Post, Mahatma Gandhi with Fritz Schumacher, and Leo Tolstoy with Theodore Roszak. In 1974 he made another film with Laurens van der Post - on the mythology of the Bushmen of southern Africa - followed by three films for the series 'The Long Search' which looked at the contemporary situation in religion, philosophy and science worldwide.
In over 150 films Jonathan has explored many other subjects, including Waldorf Education, the seven phases of life, the erosion of childhood, and people's quest for meaning and purpose in their lives. And on this journey he has worked alongside poet John Betjeman, writer and broadcaster Mark Tully in India and Pakistan, poet and novelist Ben Okri, playwright Alan Bennett, astronomer Bernard Lovell, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn and artist Cecil Collins.
Drawing on all these experiences he has, for the past three years, been at work on a book called "Where on Earth is Heaven?' to be published in 2009. Beyond that he is planning to raise funds for a documentary on the life and legacy of Rudolf Steiner..
"Needless to say," writes Jonathan - "the meetings and journeys described above, and the work that resulted from them, were enormously enriched by my time at Emerson College. To have been able to pause and take stock at such a key moment in my life - I was twenty-eight - and in the company of so many interesting and thoughtful people was a tremendous blessing for which I shall be eternally grateful. Not only did it deepen my understanding of Steiner's work, but it also helped me to put in context the experiences and ideas I had already accumulated as a young film director and as someone open to all the exciting and inspiring initiatives that were emerging in the 60s - a renaissance that I sense is trying to happen once more."