Don’t Puke

"When making a film about something that has as many downsides as alcohol, I think it’s easy to end up with a simplistic message, like “alcohol is bad”. I was hoping to avoid that by focusing purely on the experience itself rather than the consequences."

Looking to recreate a true drunken experience in his short film, 'Don't Puke', director Daniel Chisholm explains how Janka Horakova’s legless performance, along with photogrammetry and gaussian splatting techniques, enabled him to capture the authentic dizziness and stuttering rhythm of an alcohol-fuelled night out.

Masc

"We wanted to find a way to do it that was less stressful and gave more room for exploration. That ended up fitting together with this idea of making the film in five blocks. Each one was almost like a short film in its own production."

For Bertil Nilsson, making their debut feature ‘Masc’ meant avoiding the conventional production model and finding a process that allowed more time, intimacy and room for exploration. Shot with a skeleton crew over the course of around a year, the film explores masculinity, identity and the blurry boundaries between performance and reality, with Nilsson’s close collaboration with lead actor Joshua Griffin at its centre.

Ahead of Masc’s screening at the London Film Festival, we caught up with Nilsson to discuss making his debut feature, the freedom of working with limited resources and why sometimes the best way to make a film is to do it on your own terms.

Dating in Your 20s

"Bathrooms are so pivotal to dating and such a personal space where you can take a beat to reflect on your own. Being in a bathroom, The Woman is more exposed to the puppets’ barrage of opinions, who leave nothing left unsaid."

'Dating in Your 20s' turns one woman's mid-date bathroom break into a full-blown puppet musical, swerving from dreamy ballad to autotuned techno to horror rampage as every voice in her head fights for the mic. Making its online premiere on DN, filmmaking duo Lily Rutterford & Lucy Minderides tell us how they built the short from their own dating stories, a set full of hidden hatches and a cast of puppets made from old towels, despite neither of them reading a note of music.

Puke Bitch

"In order to swallow characters like this, you need to understand that what we may read as depravity on screen is actually desperation to them."

How do you make an audience empathise with people who do bad things? That’s one of the uncomfortable questions at the heart of 'Puke Bitch', Sam Tricomo’s pitch-black pilot that drops us into a murky world of loneliness, repression, desire and violence. Joining Directors Notes, Tricomo talks about finding humanity without offering absolution, balancing naturalistic performances with gothic stylisation and using sound to make darkness felt as much as seen.

10 Exciting Shorts to Keep an Eye on from the 70th BFI London Film Festival

The BFI London Film Festival is back for its 70th edition with wide-ranging shorts programmes that move effortlessly between comedy, horror, drama and political themes, bringing together established voices, festival discoveries and exciting new talent across several well-crafted strands. Directors Notes has picked out 10 of our favourite shorts from LFF 2026, each very different one from the other, for you to keep an eye out for.