Mike Downey is an author, film maker, and activist. As a non-fiction writer, Mike has published on a wide range of subjects and has garnered a vast archive of collected writings in publications from Vogue to Variety, from Screen to Stills to Cineaste, having co-founded the Moving Pictures media publishing group in the nineties. As a film maker he has worked with writers like James Ellroy, Gunter Grass, Colm Toibin, Lee Hall, David Grossmann and Vice founder Shane Smith, as well as eclectic range of directors including Agnieszka Holland, Volker Schloendorff, Peter Greenaway, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. As Chairman of the European Film Academy he is the co-founder of the International Coalition for Film Makers at Risk and for a decade was a Trustee of the White Ribbon Alliance. Former Thomas Ewing Visiting Professor of Film at Ohio University, in 2021 he became the Honorary President of the LUX Film Award, presented by the European Parliament, and in the same year he was he was awarded an O.B.E. in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to British Cinema. In 2022 the University of Warwick presented Mike with a Doctor of Literature degree, honoris causa (D.Litt.), for his contribution to World Cinema.

ISTRIA GOLD marks his debut as a novelist.

Mike Downey founded the UK-based independent production house Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME) twenty years ago in 2000. He is currently Chairman of the European Film Academy. Educated at the Universities of Warwick, Paris III (Sorbonne-Nouvelle), where he was a Boursier du Gouvernement Francais (French Government Scholar) and Paris X (Nanterre) where he did his Master’s degree and began his doctorate. He spent most of the eighties as a theatre director and producer in France, Germany, the former Yugoslavia and the U.K., and the nineties as the co-founder and publisher of the Moving Pictures International group of media publications. He established the prolific UK production house in 2000 as part of an IPO on the Frankfurt DAX and to date has production credits well over 100 feature films.

Mike was awarded The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2021, this British order of chivalry, was presented to him for his services to World Cinema. In early 2022, nominated by Lord Putnam, Mike was invited to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, joining a broad-based past membership of artists and scientist members which has included Karl Marx, Charles Dickens and Stephen Hawking.

In his relatively short career as a film producer he has worked with the likes of four times Academy award nominee Stephen Daldry, and other nominees, Peter Greenaway, Agnieszka Holland, Julien Temple, Pawel Pawlikowski, Andrzej Jakimowski, Juraj Jakubisko, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, and many other directors the length and breadth of Europe. His work as a film maker has seen projects developed with novelists James Ellroy, the late Gunter Grass, and Thomas
Keneally (Schindler's List); Academy Awarded winning writer of IDA, Rebecca Lenckiewicz, VICE Group founder and CEO Shane Smith, as well as directors like Academy Award winner Volker Schloendorff, Oscar nominee Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Julien Temple; and writers of the ilk of Lee Hall (Billy Elliot), Colm Toibin (Brooklyn), and David Grossman (To the End of the Land).

Downey is a former tutor on Sheffield University's Creative Writing for Film course, was Thomas Ewing Visiting Professor of Film at Ohio University, a member of the Board of Advisors in the film school of Oklahoma University and the co- founder and President of the Motovun
IFF in Croatia. In 2014 he became the Artistic Board Director of the Pula Film Festival to complement his work on the Zagreb Film Festival artistic board and is a long-time board member of the Isango theatre Company in Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town. He has published several lengthy tomes about producing in Europe, notably The Film Finance Handbo