He grew up speaking German, Spanish, English and some Guarani.
When Luke was four the family travelled to Paraguay to live with the Bruderhof in the remote Chaco region. Luke was born in Ludlow, Shropshire, to Lesley Holland, an illustrator and artist, and his wife, Gerty (nee Hortner), who were members of the pacifist Bruderhof Christian community at nearby Wheathill. Polite yet direct, Luke always debated respectfully but uncompromisingly about issues close to his heart as one village resident wrote, he had “an unquenchable thirst to understand and interrogate thoroughly, coupled with an almost manic drive to seek out the truth that storyteller’s gift to take a complex, multilayered issue and magically translate it into a simple, eloquent narrative”. Over the years, villagers became used to seeing Luke either pointing a camera or, more recently, holding an anti-Brexit banner outside the village post office.
The hunting ground director series#
The series also took a gentle but penetrating look at some of the older members of the community in The Ditchling Ladies and Salad Days, about the village dramatic society. For Luke, local issues could shine a light on problems and inequalities in the wider world, and in this five-part series he explored the fox hunting debate and eventual ban, the loss of local pubs to property speculators, and the controversy surrounding the life of Ditchling’s one-time resident sculptor, Eric Gill. In the series A Very English Village (2007), for the BBC’s Storyville strand, he pointed his camera at the inhabitants of Ditchling in East Sussex, his home village. More Than a Life (2002) was an intimate film about the death from cancer of Luke’s older brother, Peter. I Was a Slave Labourer (1997), shown on the BBC and throughout Europe on Arte, followed Rudy Kennedy’s campaign for compensation for slave labourers under the Nazis during the second world war. He made Good Morning Mr Hitler! (1993) with Yule, a film showing Hitler and the Nazis close up in 1939, using newly discovered colour home movies from Munich. Luke first worked as a consultant on a documentary with Nick Grey for Yorkshire Television – The Hunting Ground, which was based on his earlier photographic exhibition.
Working for the NGO Survival International between 19, Luke created media campaigns on behalf of threatened tribal people and thereafter became a documentary film-maker. In 1980 Luke’s photographic exhibition, Hunting the Pig People: Indians, Missionaries and the Promised Land, was shown first at the ICA in London, then toured across the US. “He believed that the media and campaigning could change the world”, said the film-maker Paul Yule. Throughout his life he campaigned for communities destroyed by missionaries, greed or market forces, but his work was never gloomy and was filled with characters as interesting as himself. Luke Holland, who has died aged 71, was a remarkable documentary film-maker and photographer.