Documentaries are certainly the underdog when it comes to nominations for the BAFTA Best British Short Film category. In 2025, Miranda Stern’s Milk, winner of the WeAreDN Awards, stood as the sole documentary among the five nominees, none in 2024 and 2023 also boasted a singular documentary nominee with Jacob Lee’s A Drifting Up so I was galvanised to see National Film and Television School graduate and award-winning filmmaker Huiju Park’s doc short Welcome Home Freckles in the running this year as one of two docs in contention. Whilst Park’s film operates at the intersection of lived experience and cinematic craft as she employs the visual language of fiction to interrogate intensely personal truth, this is well and truly a documentary short, and I hope to see more nominees from that discipline making it through to awards night in future years.
Four years after cutting ties with her family, Park returned to her hometown of Daegu, South Korea, with a small crew from the NFTS to film her return in which she planned to confront the generational patterns of abuse that had driven her away. Park arrived with storyboards and shot lists, determined to bring the rich, considered visual language—widely praised in other areas of Korean cinema—into the documentary form. She deliberately avoided a purely observational approach, instead pursuing the stillness and compositional depth she looks to in the best of Asian fiction cinema. As part of our 2026 BAFTA nominees interview series, we spoke with Park about her hybrid approach to documentary craft and why she wanted to remove her filmmaker identity from the frame—keeping a distance from the camera and leaving space for audience projection.
The topic is already dramatic. It’s the most devastating story. So that’s why I try to keep it really calm and create a quiet stillness so that viewers, audiences can project themselves on each character.
Most Popular
