山姆·本斯泰德，Sam is an award-winning director acclaimed for making powerful, visually distinctive and mould-breaking documentary films for platforms such as Netflix, Disney, Sky Studios, BBC and cinematic release. In his work he looks for the common threads of humanity, finding humour and empathy in places you’d often expect to find none. His films have won or been nominated for over 20 awards including, most recently, being shortlisted for an Oscar.​In 2021 his series “Puppetmaster” was released to global acclaim on Netflix, with 25 million views in the first ten days. The following year he made “Italia 90: Four Weeks That Changed The World” for Blast Films, which was nominated for Royal Television Society and Broadcast awards. In 2023, “The People’s President”, a feature doc that Sam DOP’d, was released in cinemas picking up a series of festival gongs and five Independent British Film Award nominations.Previous projects include co-directing “Mumbai High” the first ever Bollywood documentary musical with Brian Hill; the Grierson-nominated “Inside the Commons”, which saw human operated cameras inside parliament for the first time in history; and “Coach Zoran and His African Tigers”, a riotous black comedy about football and broken dreams in South Sudan for the BBC’s flagship feature doc strand, Storyville.Most recently, Sam has been directing a series for Disney plus.