‘Hell Jumper’: BBC Making Doc About British Aid Worker Killed In Ukraine From ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ Producer Expectation
EXCLUSIVE: The BBC is making a film about a young British aid worker killed in the line of fire in Ukraine.
Hell Jumper sits on a six-strong Sheffield Doc Fest slate that also features shows commemorating anniversaries of the Hiroshima bomb and the miners’ strike.
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Hell Jumper tells the story of Chris Parry and friends, a group of twenty-somethings who headed to Ukraine in a white van and hooked up with a rag-tag bunch of civilian ‘evacuators’ to help people escape their homes. Once there, the group’s missions grew riskier and riskier while they took to TikTok and Instagram to show footage of their daring rescues, with Parry killed trying to save an elderly woman trapped in her home.
The doc from Clarkson’s Farm producer Expectation and BAFTA-winning Prison helmer Paddy Wivell makes use of self-shot material, social media and video diaries. BBC Head of Documentary Commissioning Clare Sillery told Deadline it will touch on a “changing world in which a generation – Gen-Z – spend half of their life online and half in the real world.”
“It’s really interesting to be inside that life with them,” she said.
Having mainly been pitched “big international stories” since the start of the conflict, the doc will also examine the Ukraine War through a British lens, Sillery added.
Miners and bombs
Her slate has jumped on the anniversary bandwagon with Atomic People exploring the human fallout from the first and last atomic bombs used in an act of war, and The Miners’ Strike taking a look at a 40-year-old conflict that is still tearing apart communities today.
The latter, from ITV Studios indie The Garden, was commissioned off the back of James Graham’s hit BBC miners’ strike drama Sherwood.
“You could see there are still wounds there,” said Sillery. “This is a very live issue in certain parts of the country. It’s the industrial dispute that has probably caused the most rancor and deepest divide.”
Other projects to feature on Sillery’s slate are Stranger in My Family [working title] about a man who discovered he was mixed race years after being born, Instascam – Give Me Back My Face [working title], which spotlights someone falsely accused of conning people out of tens of thousands of pounds, and catfishing doc series Bait [working title].
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