Christopher Ian Smith

Christopher Ian Smith is a filmmaker, writer and visual artist based in London. Early in his career he was part of the audiovisual collective Addictive TV, which made experimental films and the ITV1 music series Mixmasters, and performed at venues including the Centre Pompidou, the ICA and Glastonbury Festival. He later worked in digital, creating applications and campaigns for brands including O2, Guinness, PlayStation and Samsung, and co-founded EMERGE, a symposium on the future of filmmaking, in partnership with the Barbican, East End Film Festival and Cork Film Festival. Since 2012 he has concentrated on moving image work spanning experimental, documentary and fiction. His feature documentary New Town Utopia (2018), narrated by Jim Broadbent, looks at the post-war new town of Basildon through the artists who live there, and was released theatrically in the UK. The project extended into a book featuring contributions from Jonathan Meades, Owen Hatherley and Gillian Darley, and a video art installation exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial. His other work includes the horror short Unreel (2022), with Zero Hours, Unholy Island and The Danse of the Green Man in development. He has also directed commercials and branded content for the BBC, Disney, Dyson, L'Oreal, TAG Heuer and Ubisoft.