After a six-year tenure as Head of the New Cinema Fund at the U.K. Film Council, and having previously established a close working relationship with Alison Owen when they both produced Paul Weiland's Roseanna's Grave and Danny Cannon's The Young Americans, Paul Trijbits joined Ms. Owen as a partner in the independent production company Ruby Films in 2007.
Ruby forged a co-production and distribution deal with ITV Studios Global Entertainment. The company now fields an extensive slate of projects for both films and television, with over two dozen currently in active development. Among these are the thriller Corsica 72, written by the team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and to be directed by Luca Guadagnino; Sex Education, written by Jonathan Stern & Jamie Minoprio, which topped the recent "Brit List" of acclaimed scripts; and, with the cooperation of band members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, a feature about legendary music group the Clash which is being written by Jez Butterworth entitled London Calling.
Ruby features produced by Mr. Trijbits include Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe and Hideo Nakata's Chatroom. Additionally for Ruby, he has executive-produced S.J. Clarkson's Toast and Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane.
He also executive-produced Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, winner of the Prix du Jury award at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival, starring Katie Jarvis opposite Michael Fassbender of Jane Eyre; and Olivier Hirschbiegel's Five Minutes of Heaven, winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival's World Cinema Dramatic Competition awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay (Guy Hibbert), starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt.
Mr. Trijbits' early feature credits as producer include Richard Stanley's Hardware. He reteamed with the latter director as executive producer of Dust Devil, and has executive-produced a host of other features. These include Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday, which won BIFAs for Best Director and Best Actor (James Nesbitt); Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters; Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes International Film Festival; Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void; and Andrea Arnold's Red Road, for which Ms. Arnold was honored with BAFTA's Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer.
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