 As a producer, Sally Hibbin was responsible for nurturing Ken
Loach's resuscitated feature film career in the early 1990s, but in a 30-year
career she has also produced many distinguished British independent films and
some outstanding television, most of it characterised by a strong commitment to
leftwing and socially progressive causes.
She was born in north London on 3 July 1953, the daughter of Nina Hibbin, the
avowedly communist film critic for the Daily Worker (later the Morning Star).
Sally, too, started as a journalist, but turned to film when she founded
Parallax Pictures in 1981, one of many independent production companies
established to exploit commissioning opportunities from the nascent Channel 4.
The name Parallax - meaning the displacement in the apparent position of an
object when regarded from two different viewpoints - encapsulated Hibbin's
desire to present alternatives to official versions of events.
Her first productions were campaigning films on behalf of the TUC (Live a
Life, 1983), CND (Cruise, 1984), the Greater London Council (Policing London,
Say No to No Say, both 1984; Hot News, 1986) and others that fitted her
description of "organisations whose promotional material was all very worthy,
but didn't have good production values". However, the GLC's abolition in 1986
deprived Parallax of a reliable income stream, and forced a change of
direction.
Produced with Skreba Films, A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) was
substantially more ambitious. This three-part dramatisation of MP Chris Mullin's
novel imagining Britain under a genuinely socialist Labour government not only
won a BAFTA and an International Emmy but became one of the most talked-about TV
dramas of its year.
A lengthy partnership with Ken Loach followed, marking a pivotal period in
the director's career. Originally intended for Channel 4, Riff-Raff (1991) won
the Critics' Award at Cannes and the inaugural Felix for Best European Film.
This unexpectedly high international profile for a low-budget London
building-site drama gave Parallax sufficient clout to start developing multiple
features, often with pan-European funding, with Hibbin as either producer or
executive producer. Alongside her work with Loach on Raining Stones (1993),
Ladybird Ladybird (1994), Land and Freedom (1995) and Carla's Song (1996), she
also developed the feature film careers of television director Les Blair (Bad
Behaviour, 1993; Stand and Deliver, 1997) and the actor Philip Davis (i.d.,
1994; Hold Back the Night, 1998).
She kept in touch with Parallax's roots by producing drama-documentaries
inspired by then-recent events: Jimmy McGovern's Dockers (Channel 4, tx.
11/7/1999) looked at the mid-1990s Liverpool dock strike, while Blind Flight (d.
John Furse, 2003) enacted the experience of Lebanon hostages Brian Keenan and
John McCarthy. Yasmin (d. Kenny Glenaan, 2004) was fiction, but its story of the
radicalisation of a young Muslim woman following reactions to the September 11
terrorist attacks could hardly have been more topical.
Very active in film education (she is senior tutor in production at the
National Film and Television School), Hibbin maintains has a parallel career as
a film writer, and is - perhaps surprisingly - a noted authority on the James
Bond and Carry On film franchises.
Michael Brooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
