Author

About the Author /

Sarah is a true multi-hyphenate within the film industry. Alongside her role as Associate Editor & Head of Outreach for Directors Notes, her extensive festival experience ranges from MC and juror duties to previously serving as Deputy Director of Brighton Rocks, where she helped steer its growth into a BIFA-qualifying event. Sarah also produces for Brighton film collective The Imaginary Project and contributes as a freelance writer for publications including 1.4 and Shots Magazine.

Music Video

Isaac Brown Blends Raw Street Energy With Mythic Staging in Genesis Owusu’s Exhilarating Music Video ‘Stampede’

Filmed inside Accra's real daredevil bike community, Isaac Brown converges two distinct visual registers into a stampede you feel from the inside out.

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Live Action

The Meet-Cute You Tell vs. The One That Actually Happened Collide in Leve Kühl’s Grindr Spot ‘Peas’

Leve Kühl unpacks the narrative power of embracing queer specificity while subverting the holiday ad format for his steamy Grindr Christmas spec advert.

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Awards, Film Festival

Directors Notes Presents the WeAreDN Awards 2026 & Twenty Years of Supporting Indie Filmmakers

Three years of the WeAreDN Awards. Twenty years of Directors Notes. Presenting our biggest celebration yet!

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Live Action

Grace Tan Transforms Trauma Into a Story of Visceral Reclamation Through the Radical Power of Queer Pole Dance

Grace Tan navigates personal grief and the physical vocabulary of pole dance to transform Madison Godfrey’s memoir-in-verse into a triumphant short film.

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Art & Fashion

Light Devours Form and Fashion Dissolves in Adam Muscat’s Otherwordly Short ‘In the Heart of the Flower Citadel’

Adam Muscat delves into translating designer nil00's mechanical flower cities into spectral silhouettes in their collaborative hybrid fashion film.

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Documentary

Livia Albeck-Ripka & Víctor Tadashi Suárez Expose the Poison of LA’s Post-Fire Limbo in ‘Still Standing’

Turning 16mm film stock, degraded tape and suffocating silence into tools of witness, 'Still Standing' documents once intimate spaces becoming hazardous zones.

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Live Action, Premiere

One Room, Two People and Everything Left Unsaid in Iris Breward’s Fly in the Ointment Short ‘Afterplay’

Iris Breward digs into her method for crafting a comedy of avoidance where a couple in a bed, post-coital, deploy every weapon except honesty, and both lose.

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Article

“Your Maybe Is Also a No” Ita O’Brien on How Intimacy Coordination Changed the Film Industry for the Better

Ita O'Brien transformed how intimacy is created on screen and now brings her extensive knowledge of craft, clear consent and care to all with her new book.

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Film Festival, Sponsored

10 Audacious, Bold and Unstoppable Short Films Screening at NFFTY 2026

From animated shorts to documentaries, experimental pieces to music videos, NFFTY 2026 arrives with a packed programme of striking range and ambition.

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Live Action, Premiere

Rhubarb’s Vivid Pink Bleeds Into the Murky Darkness of Dementia in Steven Boyle’s Stirring Surreal Short ‘Tusky’

Steven Boyle takes us inside crafting a candlelit portrait of dementia that is both unflinching and strangely beautiful as a farmer loses his grip on reality.

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Awards, Documentary

Hilla Medalia on Silent Protest, Sorrow and Her Oscar-Nominated Documentary ‘Children No More: Were and are Gone’

Hilla Medalia discusses filming a female-led Tel Aviv vigil where silence becomes the most radical, devastating protest against the killing of innocents.

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Awards, Documentary

Alison McAlpine Finds the Universe in the Unhurried Gaze of Donkeys in Oscar-Nominated Doc ‘perfectly a strangeness’

In the vastness of the desert, Alison McAlpine follows three donkeys into an abandoned observatory and discovers a new language for what a story can be.

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