Luke Holland, who has died aged 71, was a remarkable documentary film-maker and photographer.

Throughout his life he campaigned for communities destroyed by missionaries, greed or market forces, but his work was never gloomy and was filled with characters as interesting as himself. “He believed that the media and campaigning could change the world”, said the film-maker Paul Yule.

In 1980 Luke’s photographic exhibition, Hunting the Pig People: Indians, Missionaries and the Promised Land, was shown first at the ICA in London, then toured across the US. Working for the NGO Survival International between 1981 and 1991, Luke created media campaigns on behalf of threatened tribal people and thereafter became a documentary film-maker.

Luke first worked as a consultant on a documentary with Nick Grey for Yorkshire Television – The Hunting Ground, which was based on his earlier photographic exhibition. He made Good Morning Mr Hitler! (1993) with Yule, a film showing Hitler and the Nazis close up in 1939, using newly discovered colour home movies from Munich.

I Was a Slave Labourer (1997), shown on the BBC and throughout Europe on Arte, followed Rudy Kennedy’s campaign for compensation for slave labourers under the Nazis during the second world war. More Than a Life (2002) was an intimate film about the death from cancer of Luke’s older brother, Peter.

In the series A Very English Village (2007), for the BBC’s Storyville strand, he pointed his camera at the inhabitants of Ditchling in East Sussex, his home village. For Luke, local issues could shine a light on problems and inequalities in the wider world, and in this five-part series he explored the fox hunting debate and eventual ban, the loss of local pubs to property speculators, and the controversy surrounding the life of Ditchling’s one-time resident sculptor, Eric Gill.

The series also took a gentle but penetrating look at some of the older members of the community in The Ditchling Ladies and Salad Days, about the village dramatic society. Over the years, villagers became used to seeing Luke either pointing a camera or, more recently, holding an anti-Brexit banner outside the village post office.

Polite yet direct, Luke always debated respectfully but uncompromisingly about issues close to his heart; as one village resident wrote, he had “an unquenchable thirst to understand and interrogate thoroughly, coupled with an almost manic drive to seek out the truth; that storyteller’s gift to take a complex, multilayered issue and magically translate it into a simple, eloquent narrative”.

Luke was born in Ludlow, Shropshire, to Lesley Holland, an illustrator and artist, and his wife, Gerty (nee Hortner), who were members of the pacifist Bruderhof Christian community at nearby Wheathill. When Luke was four the family travelled to Paraguay to live with the Bruderhof in the remote Chaco region. He grew up speaking German, Spanish, English and some Guarani. When the family returned to the UK a decade later, Luke went to school in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and then to a teacher training college allied to Manchester University, where he got a BEd in German and theatre studies.

It was only as a teenager that Luke had discovered that his mother had been a Jewish refugee from Vienna and that her family had been killed in the Holocaust. In the last decade of his life he took to the road and, with a small camera, he went in search of old Nazis in Germany and Austria. Little archive existed about the perpetrators, apart from those held to account at Nuremburg.

Fearing memories would be half-recollections or lies, he discovered harrowing stories told from clean, well decorated homes with cuckoo clocks, by people apparently leading calm lives in ordinary towns, often near the empty shrines of the camps. “Perpetrators are not born,” Luke wrote in the epigraph of his film, “they are made.”

When Luke was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015, his friend and fellow film-maker Nick Broomfield remembers his bravery, determination and ability to have fun: “Luke calmly told [the doctor] that he had no intention of dying and he went on to amaze everyone by living for more than five more years. He was always the last man dancing at a good party.”

In the final months of his life Luke completed his documentary masterpiece, Final Account, based on nearly 300 filmed interviews with elderly perpetrators and witnesses from the Nazi side; the archive of this work will be housed at University College London, the Wiener Holocaust library in London and the INA (the National Audiovisual Institute) in Paris.

Luke remained stoic and full of plans. A week before his death he spoke of how he wanted to create a UN Convention on Ecocide.

He is survived by his wife, Yvonne Hennessy, whom he met at college in 1969, and married in 1980, and their sons, Zefi and Hugh, and by four of his five siblings, Gottfried, Matt, Andreas and Ruth.

• Luke Holland, film-maker, born 25 October 1948; died 10 June 2020