Proud Dad

"There's nothing funnier than what's not said — the glances and scolding looks. Proud Dad gave me a ton of opportunities to play with that."

Kyle Jon Shephard returns to DN with Proud Dad, an uncomfortable comedy in which a missing child investigation is quietly upstaged by a father's inconvenient ego. Starring Hugh Dennis as a man whose grief performance can't quite hide his need to be seen, and written and produced by Alex Smith, the short's crime drama visual restraint lets actors Adie Mueller & James Tapp land comedic blows with the smallest of glances.

Skin Deep

"The sinister comes from the subtlety; it's like having a villain who could also be your friend or family, or someone you work with, and you'd have no idea."

A secret cam-site obsession blooms as a worsening rash spreads across a girlfriend's skin in Hector Bell's body-horror short Skin Deep — is it a strange coincidence or a supernatural reckoning for the curated modern man who'd absolutely consider himself one of the good ones?

Pickled

"I wanted it to literally express her emotion like a dog would with its ears, so I built in tiny metal joints into Edie’s hair to make it movable."

In Fanny Capu's stop-motion fable Pickled — premiering in La Cinef at the 79th Cannes film festival — a young girl and her grandmother live in a crumbling mansion stuffed wall-to-wall with green-tinted preserves, where the weight of what's been hoarded threatens to swallow the next generation whole. The NFTS graduate sits down with DN to unpack the craft behind her short: pigtails wired to perk up and drop with Edie's mood, magnetic replacement faces, and bare toes individually rigged so her dancing reads from the soles up.

The Tobacconist

"Film productions can be grimly transient entities. They come, they go. My work is all about connecting with people for the long-term."

Years of photographing Brixton's overlooked corners laid the foundation for Keifer Nyron Taylor's BFI Network film The Tobacconist, the South London odyssey in which a British-Jamaican hustler shifts counterfeit tobacco to fund his deportation-threatened mother's passage home.

Left Behind, Still Standing

"I think the feeling I was searching for is similar to the sublime in nature: the awe of something immense that could ultimately hurt you, but is also beautiful, and something we remain connected to."

NFTS director Vida Skerk sits down with DN to discuss her second Cannes La Cinef selection short, Left Behind, Still Standing - a ghost story in which an immigrant overseeing the dismantling of a closed British steelworks finds a shared solidarity with the laid-off workers.