Career
Miller started his working life as a freelance cameraman, and in 1995 joined the Frontline News collective as cameraman, producer, and director. He reported from the vicious civil war in Algeria and from most of the world's major trouble spots from 1995 onwards, working for CNN, and for all the leading news broadcasters in Britain.
In 1999 he made his first film for Hardcash Productions, Prime Suspects, about a massacre in Kosovo for Channel 4's Dispatches programme. This film won the Royal Television Society (RTS) award for International Current Affairs in 1999. Almost every film he made for Hardcash won major awards. Prime Suspects was followed by Dying For The President about the Second Chechen War and Children of the Secret State about Korea, both also for Dispatches.
Miller then teamed up with reporter Saira Shah, daughter of the writer Idries Shah, to make Beneath the Veil, about the life of women in Taliban-run Afghanistan. This film, shown on Dispatches and CNN, repeated the success of Prime Suspects by again winning the RTS International Current Affairs award. It also won an Emmy Award, a BAFTA, and the RTS "Programme of the Year" award. In addition, Miller won the RTS craft award for his outstanding photography. Miller and Shah's second film, Unholy War, shot at the height of the Afghanistan war in 2001, won Miller his first Emmy as director and (together with Beneath the Veil) also the prestigious Peabody award. Miller and Shah almost died of sub-zero temperatures while crossing the Hindu Kush during the making of this film. "Frostbite Films" was the name of the independent film production company set up by Miller and Shah in 2001 after this experience.
Miller and Shah were working on a documentary for the American cable network HBO at the time of his death. The resulting film, Death in Gaza, was released in 2004, and won three Emmys and one BAFTA TV award in 2005. Miller received posthumously the Rory Peck Award for Features in 2004 for Death in Gaza, having been a finalist on three previous occasions.
After Miller's death, his friend Fergal Keane wrote, "James Miller was one of the finest journalistic talents I have ever known. Had he lived he would undoubtedly have come to be recognised as one of the greatest documentary makers of his generation. As it is he leaves a journalistic legacy of immense worth."
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