Eric Abraham is a film, television and theatre producer, best known for developing, producing and distributing two Academy award-winning movies. Best Foreign Language film 1996: the Czech-language KOLYA, directed by Jan Svěrák; and Best Foreign Language film 2014: the Polish-language IDA, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. In both instances, these were the first Oscars for the Czech Republic and Poland.
A South African-born former journalist and human rights activist banned and house-arrested by the apartheid government in 1976 and exiled for 15 years, he became a producer of BBC TV’s premier current affairs programme Panorama before going on to set up his independent film, TV and theatre company Portobello.
He went on to produce many acclaimed television dramas, including John le Carré’s A MURDER OF QUALITY and the peak-time hit BBC TV crime series DALZIEL & PASCOE. His first motion picture was Roald Dahl’s DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD with three generations of the Irons/Cusack acting family – Jeremy Irons, Sam Irons, his son and Sam’s grandfather, the legendary Irish actor Cyril Cusack. His other movies include: Jan Svěrák’s DARK BLUE WORLD, EMPTIES and KOOKY, and the soon to be released WHAT A WAY TO GO; the Czech director Jiří Menzel’s THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF IVAN CHONKIN which won a number of awards including the Jury Prize The Silver Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival (Menzel’s 1967 CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS won the 1967 Best Foreign Language film Oscar for Czechoslovakia). Among other movies he developed and produced include Tim Roth’s THE WAR ZONE with Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone; Jez Butterworth’s MOJO with Harold Pinter and BIRTHDAY GIRL with Nicole Kidman; QUIET CHAOS starring Nanni Moretti; Joshua Marston’s Albanian language 2011 Silver Bear winner at the Berlin International Film Festival THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD; Oliver Hermanus’s South African movie MOFFIE which opened at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival; Darren Thornton’s Irish comedy FOUR MOTHERS, for which James McArdle won the 2025 Scottish BAFTA for Best Actor. The movie was nominated for 7 Irish Film and Television Awards. Most recently, he has produced South African John Trengove’s Afrikaans language movie THE SMELL OF APPLES and is Exec Producing Lukas Dhont’s new movie COWARD. He is also Exec Producing Hungarian István Szabó’s EMBERS with Ralph Fiennes, Viggo Mortensen and Charlotte Rampling.
He has commissioned theatre plays from Christopher Hampton, Nick Wright, the late Hugh Whitemore and Simon Gray, and from Frank McGuinness and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. His theatre productions include Hugh Whitemore’s adaptation of Pirandello’s AS YOU DESIRE ME, starring Bob Hoskins and Kristin Scott-Thomas; Christopher Hampton’s stage version of Sándor Márai’s EMBERS, which marked Jeremy Irons’ return to the stage after twenty years and was directed by the Tony award-winning Michael Blakemore; Polly Stenham’s multi-award winning THAT FACE; and the acclaimed West End transfer of Bruce Norris’ CLYBOURNE PARK, winner of the Olivier Award for Best Play, 2011. In 2006 and 2010 he set up and worked with Isango Portobello, a collaboration with the director Mark Dornford-May, whose productions included A CHRISTMAS CAROL – IKRISMAS KHEROL and THE MYSTERIES – YIIMIMANGALISO, premiering in Cape Town at the Baxter Theatre and at the Young Vic in London.
In 2008 he commissioned a South African version of Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE – IMPEMPE YOMLINGO – with a black cast from Cape Town’s township acapella with marimbas which ran in London’s West End and won an Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival and travelled the world from the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris to Tokyo and he opened a theatre he commissioned and built in Cape Town South Africa to honour Africa’s greatest playwright Athol Fugard called THE FUGARD. This theatre ran for ten years and won numerous South African awards for its productions – see The Fugard Archival website – thefugard.com – from South Africa’s first black musical KING KONG to WEST SIDE STORY, CABARET and THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, alongside new work including Nick Wright’s A HUMAN BEING DIED THAT NIGHT (The Fugard/The Market Theatre/The Hampstead Theatre/BAM) and David Kramer’s musicals KANALA: DISTRICT 6 and ORPHEUS IN AFRICA.
Many new South African plays and musicals were commissioned and performed. Covid killed The Fugard, but it left a considerable legacy behind. Eric Abraham is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences AMPAS under whose aegis the Oscars fall; the British Academy of Film and Television Arts BAFTA; the European Film Academy EFA and an honorary member of the Czech Film Academy. He has established a philanthropic trust and foundation – The Common Humanity Arts Trust (CHAT) and The Common Humanity Arts Foundation (CHAF) – to support the arts in the broadest sense, including film, theatre, television, literature, and music.
With his wife, the writer, publisher, and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing, he co-founded the Portobello Books publishing imprint in 2005. Later that year, they acquired the highly regarded literary journal Granta, which she edited for ten years, and Granta Books, of which Sigrid Rausing is now the owner and publisher. Her SIGRID RAUSING TRUST (SRT), which has, under her direct guidance, been very generously contributing to many human rights, women’s rights and environmental justice groups for the last 30 years.
Jack Sidey is a film producer at Portobello Productions in London. After six years at Working Title Films, he joined Eric Abraham at Portobello. Their first film together, Oliver Hermanus’s MOFFIE – which Jack co-wrote and produced – premiered at the 76th Venice Film Festival, earning him a 2021 BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. Since then, he has produced Darren and Colin Thornton’s FOUR MOTHERS, winner of the BFI London Film Festival Audience Award and nominated for seven Irish Film & Television Academy awards, with James McArdle taking Best Actor at the BAFTA Scotland Awards; Jan Svěrák’s Czech box-office hit WHAT A WAY TO GO; and John Trengove’s THE SMELL OF APPLES, which has its world premiere at TIFF this year. He also executive produced Lukas Dhont’s COWARD, whose leads shared Best Actor at Cannes, and is co-producer on Juho Kuosmanen’s DREAM COME TRUE, in production.
Jan Svěrák is an Academy Award-winning director and producer. His first feature film, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, written by his father and regular collaborator, Zdeněk Svěrák (who also stars in the movie), was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He followed it with ACCUMULATOR 1, an action/fantasy film about television’s vampire-like capacity to suck a person’s life force—then the biggest Czech production ever made—which won the Media Prize at Venice and the Czech Lion for the most popular Czech film of the year.
KOLYA, his first collaboration with producer Eric Abraham and again scripted by and starring his father, won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Picture. It began a partnership that has now run for thirty years and five further films: DARK BLUE WORLD, a Second World War drama set in Britain; EMPTIES, a comic love story about a man facing up to old age; KOOKY, an adventure for children and adults alike combining live action and puppets; THE THREE BROTHERS, a musical fairytale that played to record-breaking audiences in Czech cinemas; and most recently WHAT A WAY TO GO, written by Jan himself, in which five old friends take a rented yacht around the Greek islands in defiance of their disapproving children. A major hit in Czech cinemas, it is only the fourth Czech film in thirty years to be given a wide UK release.
He has also directed BAREFOOT, a story of wartime childhood that completed a quartet of films tracing one man’s life against the events of the century, and, as a producer, made Alice Nellis’ Czech Lion-winning LITTLE GIRL BLUE.
