The O’Connor Brothers

Matthew and Barnaby are a co-Producing and co-Directing team whose work has been screened at some of the world’s best film festivals and broadcast on several major streaming platforms and television networks. They have received awards in documentary directing and producing and sold their completed films to STARZ, Vice, Amazon, Apple and numerous terrestrial networks.

The brothers grew up in Kenya. They spent their first six years in Nyeri, a small town at the base of Mount Kenya before moving to Nairobi. Nyeri was East Africa at its most rural. The first house they lived in was a goat shed before they took up residence and had no electricity.

Growing up in Kenya also offered a number of unique experiences including Matthew almost being eaten by a lion at the tender (no pun intended) age of six and Barnaby waking up to find a highly venomous black mamba snake in his bedroom several years later. They spoke a mixture of English and Swahili, although they never realized this until they moved to England in their early teens.

That experience of coming to the UK proved a massive culture shock. From not being understood when they asked where the toilet was (the word used almost universally in Kenya is the Swahili term ‘choo’) to the food, the culture and the weather, it was a huge adjustment. Their new classmates seemed so much older and more sophisticated – the result, perhaps, of more exposure to television and consumerism. In Kenya, there was only one television channel and it was on from 3pm – midnight. There were no sweets or other sugary treats, no toy shops and almost all recreation time was spent playing outside.

They were also continuously met with the same question whenever they told people they were from Kenya. “But you’re white?” They now understand this reaction, of course, but it was baffling at the time.

This experience of being outsiders is something that ultimately came to inform their choices and the kind of projects they are drawn to. Whether it’s elite athletes silently struggling to deal with mental health issues, marijuana growers up in the mountains of California illegally growing weed or socially awkward men trying to figure out how to get date, the one thread that runs through all their films is the protagonists often sit outside the mainstream. These protagonists have, for better or worse decided to adopt extreme measures either to fit in with society or get one up on it.

They strive for integrity, production value and the highest quality storytelling in everything they do. They also aim to always include something a producer they work with affectionately refers to as the F.M.W. factor (“F*ck Me Wow”) in all their films. The aim is to inspire, delight, shake people up and above all make people pause for thought and consider the majesty, the lunacy and the fascination of the world around them.