Cutting Edge , Channel 4’s flagship documentary series, returns with a run of 15 new, distinctive and compelling films that offer a snapshot of modern life from some of the UK’s most influential directors as well as from the sharpest emerging talent. The opening film is A Boy Called Alex .

Since he began playing the piano at the age of three, Alex Stobbs has shown a remarkable gift for music. By the time he was eight years old, he was touring Europe as a chorister. At 13, he won a music scholarship to Eton, a school his parents could never have hoped to afford. Today Alex is 16, astonishing teachers and pupils with his brilliance as an organist, pianist, chorister, composer and conductor. By any account, a sparkling future lies ahead of him. Except Alex has a particularly virulent form of cystic fibrosis, which is slowly destroying his digestive system and his lungs.

Over the years, the disease has attacked his bones and left him partially deaf, especially distressing for a musician. There is no cure. Without the massive cocktail of drugs pumped into his bloodstream day and night, Alex would not be alive today. But neither the drugs nor the disease will stop Alex from now taking on the greatest musical challenge of his life: to conduct a performance of Bach’s epic choral work, the Magnificat , before an audience of several hundred people in the glorious setting of Eton’s 15th-century chapel.

A Boy Called Alex follows Alex over three extraordinary months as he sets out to achieve his goal. Filmed with remarkable access to Eton, a school which rarely allows cameras inside its gates, the documentary charts the highs and lows of rehearsals as Alex pummels the school’s orchestra into shape, meeting his teachers, his friends, his doctors and his family along the way. The result is an intimate, sometimes funny, and often moving insight into his world at home, hospital and school. It is directed by Emmy Award-winning Stephen Walker, whose previous Channel 4 film Young@Heart , about an American chorus of rock ‘n’ roll pensioners, won the Audience Award at the LA Film Festival and will be released theatrically in the USA by Fox in Spring 2008.

Thursday 24 January 2008, Channel 4, 9PM