Cinema Verity was a British independent television and film production company, founded in 1985 by Verity Lambert, the television producer, who named the company after herself and as a pun on the expression 'cinéma vérité'.
The company's first major venture was the 1988 feature film A Cry in the Dark, which was produced by Lambert herself and based on the infamous Azaria Chamberlain 'dingo baby' case in Australia in the early 1980s.
Thereafter, the company was active mainly in television, producing two successful sitcoms for BBC1, May to December (1989–94) and So Haunt Me (1992–94). Less successfully during this period, they also co-produced the much-derided soap opera Eldorado (1992–93).
Other work included the literary adaptation The Cazalets for BBC One in 2001. This programme was co-produced by actress Joanna Lumley, whose initial idea the adaptation had been.
The company was voluntarily dissolved in 2011.
Famous quotes containing the words cinema and/or verity:
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“In verity ... we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)