Outspoken film producer Jonathan Sothcott, whose Hereford Films is behind popular gangster series such as the We Still Kill The Old Way and Bonded By Blood flicks, has won a second prestigious CEO award. He has been crowned ‘Best Commercial Film Production CEO’ in the 2019 Global CEO Excellence Awards. It follows his recognition as ‘Most Innovative Film Production CEO’ in 2018.

In his early twenties, Sothcott was the youngest television executive in the UK, leading The Horror Channel from launch to Sky staple before switching gears to focus on films. Surrounding himself with a coterie of British cinema’s blokiest alpha males (Danny Dyer, Martin Kemp, Steven Berkoff, Billy Murray et al) he found a groove making low budget, colourful gangster movies, all with gloriously tacky black, white and red covers.

In 2013 his film Vendetta offered a lifeline to Danny Dyer’s flagging career, giving him the quality role he’d searched for for a decade. Critically acclaimed (including as Film 2013’s Film of the Week) in as much as these things can be, it was a huge success, eventually becoming the most successful Brit indie of the year. Sothcott followed it up with his signature film, gangland revenge drama We Still Kill The Old Way, which offered up a welcome return to the screen for former Saint Ian Ogilvy, retooled as a charming underworld rogue. Sothcott has a flair for casting these films with much loved and often older TV faces, something nobody else in this space really seems to have a handle on.

Unfailingly commercial, Sothcott is something of an anomaly in the British film industry, shying away from the luvvie culture and preferring instead to cultivate his own brand of sweary, violent geezer flicks, hated by the critics but beloved by DVD buyers in supermarkets up and down the country. Once described as “the Poundland Guy Ritchie” Sothcott is an unapologetic populist: a breath of fresh air in an achingly pretentious industry. An champion of physical media in a digital age, he puts his money where his mouth is – his most recent film, The Krays Dead Man Walking, had the biggest opening week of any non-theatrical British film in 2018, outselling Black Panther and Ready Player One.

The latest feather in Sothcott’s cap is a further confirmation of his status at the forefront of the British film industry.