Rex Bloomstein began his career as a documentary director with the BBC in the 1970s contributing to series like ‘All In A Day,’ ‘The Advisors’, ‘Having A Lovely Time’ and ‘The Likes Of…’ as well as films such as ‘Musclemen’, ‘The Appeal’, ‘The Patient Is The Family’, ‘Tom Keating: Portrait Of A Master Forger’ and ‘Alcamo: The Anatomy of A Mafia Town’. 

His films on human rights, crime and punishment and the Holocaust then became major themes in his work. He helped pioneer the modern prison documentary in the UK, exposing the hidden realities of prison life with documentaries such as ‘The Sentence’, ’Release’, ‘Prisoners’ Wives’, ‘Parole’, ‘Lifers’ and ’Strangeways’, winner of two British Academy Awards - all made in the 1970s and ‘80s. He returned to the subject in 2000 with ‘Strangeways Revisited’, and in 2003 produced ‘Lifer, Living with Murder’, followed in 2005 with, ‘Kids Behind Bars’.

He created and developed 11 years of human rights appeals for the BBC between 1988 and 1999 with the series ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, ‘Urgent Action’ and ‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’.

As well as producing and directing ‘Auschwitz and the Allies’ (1982) Rex made a three-part history of anti-Semitism, ‘The Longest Hatred’ (1989). His award-winning film, ‘KZ’ (2005) has been described as the “first post-modern Holocaust documentary”. In 2008, his second feature documentary, ‘An Independent Mind’, examined the fundamental right of freedom of expression by featuring the stories of artists, writers and musicians living under censorship around the world. This led in 2010, to ‘This Prison Where I Live’, a film which campaigned against the unjust imprisonment of Zarganar, Burma’s greatest living comedian. Zarganar is now free. 2019 saw the film ‘A Second Chance’ on prisoner rehabilitation.

Rex Bloomstein has produced and presented a number of documentaries for BBC Radio including, on the criminal justice system, the award winning ‘Dying Inside’, ‘Inside The Sex Offenders Prison’ and ‘Parole, A Calculated Risk’.