Teddy Leifer is an Academy Award-nominated film producer[1]. He founded Rise Films in 2006, a London-based production company[2].
He has produced a number of award-winning films and television programmes, including The Invisible War, Icarus, All That Breathes, The Interrupters, Dreamcatcher, We Are Together, Rough Aunties, Mayor, The Art of Political Murder, George Carlin's American Dream and Plebs.
The Guardian newspaper listed Leifer in the "100 most innovative and influential people in British creative and media industries"[3]. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences[4], BAFTA and the Producers Guild of America.
Leifer’s career began in 2006 with We Are Together, a documentary about the orphanage, Agape, in South Africa, which won the Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at Tribeca Film Festival[5].
He then produced Rough Aunties, his first collaboration with director Kim Longinotto, which won the Grand Jury Prize in the 'World Cinema — Documentary' category at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival[6]. He later produced Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher in 2015, which went on to win Sundance’s World Cinema Directing Award[7].
Leifer was the executive producer of Academy Award-winning documentary Icarus in 2017[8], and Mayor in 2020, which won an Emmy[9]. He also produced Dror Moreh’s The Human Factor, about the United States’ 30-year effort to bring peace to the Middle East.
In 2022, he produced All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen - the first film to have won both the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival[10]. The film subsequently received BAFTA[11] and Oscar nominations for Best Documentary[12].
Other productions include George Carlin’s American Dream, a two-part documentary directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio which won the 2022 Emmy for Outstanding Documentary[13] and Once Upon A Time In Londongrad[14], a political thriller about 14 mysterious UK deaths with alleged Russian links.
Leifer also produced award-winning Roman sitcom Plebs, which was the most-watched show in ITV2’s history[15]. The series ended after five seasons with a feature-length special[16] released in 2022.