Mango

"I knew that the house needed to be a witness of the unspoken history of the place and of the characters. It was more like casting than scouting, and I found the perfect house."

In her quietly evocative short Mango, Randa Ali frames a family home on the brink of disappearance—and the mango tree rooted in its garden—as vessels of memory, loss, and lingering sweetness, as a woman returns one last time to confront the fragile space between past and present, and the unspoken grief tied to her father and the familiar spaces of her past.

The Mountain

"Nothing is funnier than comedy played dead-seriously, and it was important for us that these characters were complex, conflicted. We didn’t want to make fun of them, or the situation they were in."

Directing duo Will Mayo & Ian Scott McGregor explain how they took a real-life viral clip of a news anchor's on-air gaffe and expanded it forwards and backwards into comedy-drama The Mountain, a character-driven film about a marriage splatting against a wall.

The Truck

"It was really important to me to lull and seduce, in a way, the audience into the romance of small town America, before complicating that experience with the more harsh realities of our current moment."

In her NYU grad film The Truck Liz Rao evokes the real-world consequences of the post Roe vs. Wade era in America, as a loved-up teenage couple have their romantic bubble burst when denied the right to buy morning after birth control medication, forcing them to rely on the good graces of a stranger. Liz talks to DN about the genesis of the story, how her childhood home served as inspiration for the locations, and creating a short film that would go on to be executive produced by Joan Chen and Spike Lee.

Meet the WeAreDN Award 2026 Jury

For our 20th anniversary, we’ve assembled a powerhouse jury of female visionaries we’ve long admired to select this year's winners of the WeAreDN Awards.

• CATH LE COUTEUR - Shooting People Co-Founder

• ZOE ROTHWELL - Bolton International Film Festival Producer & Programmer

• MIRANDA STERN - BAFTA-nominated Writer/Director

They’ve been hard at work watching and voting on this year’s nominated films to select the winners who will be announced at our London awards event on Thursday, 7th May, from 7 pm at Lanzarote Works.

Peas

"People type things on apps that they would never actually say in person. So taking that extreme digital confidence and dropping it into a real-life conversation created immediate awkwardness."

Filmmaker Leve Kühl contrasts the love story you tell your parents with the one that actually happened in his Grindr ad Peas, a film that embraces the gloriously messy truth of queer dating over a picture-perfect meet-cute.