Beginning with Welcome to Sarajevo, shot on location while the war was still unfinished, 46-year-old Winterbottom . . . best known on TV for the Roddy Doyle mini-series Family . . . has made his reputation filming real life dramas in documentary style.

"Danny Pearl and the three British Muslims abducted by the Americans in Afghanistan and held as prisoners in Guantanamo for two years were. . . both, in a way, victims of extreme reactions to 9/11." says Winterbottom.

What is remarkable about Marianne Pearl is that she shows no bitterness or hatred. "When I'm making a film I'm not putting a message in it, " says Winterbottom. "I'm making that story. I try to make it accurate.

The fact is that Marianne is an incredibly strong woman with a terribly brave reaction to something so horrifying."

When Winterbottom heard of Pearl's death he was in Peshawar filming In This Road, a harrowing story of two Afghan refuges who travel across Asia and Europe to Britain with the help of people smugglers. "So I had my own experience of Pakistan when I read Marianne's book, and it seemed very similar. If you go to Pakistan thinking you are going to understand who the good guys and who the bad guys are you're going to be sadly disillusioned, because it's so interconnected and so complicated to judge motives there."