Team DN Are In The Palace

If you’re heading to Pernik, Bulgaria, this weekend for the fabulous Oscar-qualifying In The Palace Short Film Festival, be sure to say hi to MarBelle & Mark, who are both on the ground as part of the jury and will undoubtedly be propping up the bar in between their official duties.

The Birdwatcher

"My main themes here were the ‘destruction of the soul’ and an ‘extraction of something’. The early genesis of the project came from an image I saw online, a painting, which showed something that looked like the annihilation of a person. This felt fitting for The Watcher’s experience."

Director Ryan Mackfall & producer Kingsley Marshall talk to DN about the genesis of their Lovecraftian folk horror 'The Birdwatcher', which sees investigators enter a birdwatching hide seeking answers to the sudden disappearance of a grieving man. We discuss the performances, production design and special effects which brought the short to life, the haunting score that envelopes it, and how working with a local wildlife society alongside an army of committed Falmouth University film students made it all possible.

Get 25% Off Jeanie Finlay’s Your Fat Friend Online Case Study Event

Filmmaker Jeanie Finlay and DN go back almost twenty years, and we’re proud to see she's still tearing up the rulebook by forging her own path to build audiences for her award-winning films. Fresh from the Sheffield DocFest premiere of her tenth feature doc, All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, Jeanie and her Glimmerama co-founder Suzanne Alizart have turned their experience of releasing Your Fat Friend into an online case study—breaking down the creative campaign that saw the film top the UK theatrical documentary box office in its week of release, become the #1 film on Curzon at Home and the most successful film on Jolt, ever. Even better, they’re offering the DN community 25% off the event ticket price:

Learn something, get angry, have a good time:
The creative, direct distribution of Your Fat Friend.

• 📅 Wed 1st July 2026 · 8pm UK / 3pm ET / 12pm PT

• 🎬 60-min presentation + 30-min Q&A · Join live or access recording for a limited time

• 🎟️ $20 · Special rate for the DN community with code: WEAREDN25OFF

In Your Hands

"The shaving scenes were always meant to be these dances of sensuality and danger. I was explicitly saying to the team that they should feel almost like love scenes that flirt with murder."

An innocuous barbershop shave becomes the focus of a stranger's dangerous, projected desire in Luigi Sibona's Grey Moth produced psychosexual thriller 'In Your Hands' starring Darryl Foster and Frankie Wilson. Luigi returns to DN for the film’s online premiere to take us inside the psychosexual architecture of his unnerving thriller.

Cactus Pears

"This film cannot look like any other Indian film or for that matter any other Marathi film. I told them I needed to have a very specific, different looking film."

With ‘Cactus Pears’ hitting UK cinema screens from today, we revisit writer/director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade's interview with DN's Nimi Raja about his emotionally tender, multilayered debut feature, delving into the film's subversion of queer film tropes, shooting with vintage Russian lenses, and his overarching desire to create "life on screen" in his films.