Brian Moser

Brian John Moser (30 January 1935 – 16 February 2023) was a British documentary filmmaker who made films between 1963 and 1998, including a television series called Disappearing World for Granada Television. This BAFTA-winning series, which began in 1970 and ran for more than 20 years, told the stories of indigenous peoples under threat from the advance of the outside world, in their own words. Moser was also a documentary-maker for World in Action, a long-running Granada TV current affairs programmes, with his most notable contribution to the series coming with the death of Che Guevara.

Early life and education Born in London in 1935, the son of Charles (Charlie) Moser, from a family of Bradford wool merchants of German Jewish descent, and his wife, Eliza , a British artist whose family ran an import-export business in Chile. The subsequent World in Action film, The End of a Revolution? reported that contrary to the Bolivian authorities' claim that Guevara had died of his wounds after being "shot and captured", he had actually been killed 24 hours after he was apprehended.

Disappearing World became a landmark anthropological series offering intimate portraits of remote communities, like the Cuiva, Embera and Panare of South America, the nomadic Tuareg of the Sahara, the Kurdish Dervishes and the Meo of Laos. Each episode was filmed on 16mm film, usually taking about four weeks. A three-month edit in the Granada studios in Manchester followed. was filmed about a nomadic Colombian tribe that had barely been touched by contemporary society. Others provided insights into the Meo people of Laos (1972), where warfare was leading to the virtual destruction of the entire tribal community, and the Qaderi dervishes of Iranian Kurdistan, an Islamic order of Sunni Kurds with bizarre rituals (1973). Another two made by Moser with the Disappearing World team and the veteran anthropologist Owen Lattimore on the Khalkha of Mongolia, were screened in 1975, but – at the request of the Mongolian government – not under the series title.

Frontier series In 1977–78, while still on the Granada staff, Moser spent eight months with his wife Caroline, plus their two young sons Titus and Nat, living in a bamboo hut built above a swamp in a slum community in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

This became the first episode of a trilogy in a new series Frontier exploring the lives of people living on the edge of society. In a second Frontier trilogy, for Central Independent Television, in 1983, Moser followed the trail of cocaine production from Colombia and Bolivia to its consumption in Florida.

His last few years were spent living in a cottage in Dorset, organising his substantial collection of photos into a book Frontier People with the help of Titus. 1963: Bronchitis (World in Action) 1964: Palomares (World in Action) 1966: State of Emergency (World in Action) 1966: Black Power (The World Tomorrow) 1966: Lesotho – Black Oasis (The World Tomorrow) 1967: Bolivia -The End of a Revolution? (World in Action) 1967: A New Kind of Match (The World Tomorrow) 1968: Cuba – One Way to Change the World (World in Action) 1968: Wake Up and Work Together (World in Action) 1968: Take it Easy (World in Action) 1970: Peru – An Act of God (World in Action) 1971: The Last of the Cuiva (Disappearing World) 1971: Embera – The End of the Road (Disappearing World) 1971: War of the Gods (Disappearing World) 1972: Vietnam -The Siege of Kontum (World in Action) 1972: The Meo (Disappearing World) 1973: Dervishes of Kurdistan (Disappearing World) 1975: Mongolia – On the Edge of the Gobi (Disappearing World) 1975: Mongolia – The City on the Steppes (Disappearing World) 1981: People of the Barrio (Frontier) 1981: Emerald Miners of Muzo (Frontier) 1981: Ranchers of the Sierra (Frontier) 1983: Colombia – A Small Family Business (Frontier) 1983: Bolivia – God Gave Us the Leaf (Frontier) 1983: USA – Here's $20 Stick It Up Your Nose (Frontier) 1985: The Search for Mengele 1988: In Search of the Assassin (Assignment) 1990: Lines of Blood (Viewpoint) 1992: Invasion (Before Columbus) 1992: Conversion (Before Columbus) 1992: Rebellion (Before Columbus) 1993: My Homeland, Your Homeland (Assignment) 1994/1995: The Loved Ones 1995: The Shame of Cromwell Street (Dispatches) 1995: A Mission for Martyrs (Dispatches) 1997: The Fire of Kali (Everyman) 1998: Backyard 1954–1990 (Cold War) 1998: The Long Weekend

Films about Brian Moser 1983: A South American Journey 2016: Ignacio's Legacy 2025: Mucker

Books Brian Moser and Donald Tayler, The Cocaine Eaters, Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1965