Social Issues Archives - Directors Notes

Kelly Sarri Turns a Punishing Summer Into Intimate, Generational Warfare in Her Scorching Climate Short ‘Heat Me’

Kelly Sarri grounds global climate anxieties within the invisible domestic toll borne by three generations of women inside a sweltering Greek apartment.

Live Action

David Huang & Albie Smith-Chang on Blurring Reality and Fiction in iPhone Short Film ‘WE BUY GOLD’

David Huang & Albie Smith-Chang on how real locations, heavy improvisation and shooting on iPhone gave their short its authentic, unpredictable feel.

Animation, Live Action, Premiere

Live-Action Grime Meets Hand-Drawn Whimsy in Cameron Macgowan’s Silent Eco-Fable of Scavengers and Sprouts ‘Seed’

Shot with friends in Kananaskis wilderness dressed in scavenged junk, Cameron Macgowan's charming wordless short grew through years of unhurried collaboration.

Live Action, Premiere

Tim Nathan Skewers Late-Stage Capitalist Britain in Absurdist Comedy ‘Thoughts & Prayers’

Combining precise cinematography with dry humour, Tim Nathan reveals how he grounded absurdity in truth in his comic take on contemporary Britain.

Film Festival, Live Action

Cannes Double-Hitter Vida Skerk Finds Solidarity in the Industrial Sublime in Haunting ‘Left Behind, Still Standing’

Vida Skerk's second consecutive La Cinef Cannes selected short binds a closing British steelworks and the immigrant overseeing it into one haunted reckoning.

Live Action, Premiere

Ghosts of Empire Bleed Through a Hustler’s Frantic South London Odyssey in Keifer Nyron Taylor’s ‘The Tobacconist’

Keifer Nyron Taylor unpacks how years of photographing Brixton laid the foundation for his 16mm depiction of a vibrant community threatened by gentrification.

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.

Awards, Documentary

Joshua Seftel Finds the Weight of Absence in the Specific and Small in Oscar-Winning Doc ‘All the Empty Rooms’

Stripping back commentary and even dialogue, Joshua Seftel builds a documentary film about gun violence from silence and the objects children left behind.

Awards, Documentary

Craig Renaud Mines 20 Years of War Journalism in Tribute to His Brother in ‘Armed Only With a Camera’

Craig Renaud discusses facing the impossible task of turning a tragedy into a cinematic tribute while wrestling with the ethical boundaries of showing death.

Live Action, Premiere

Emotional Repression Becomes Public Health Crisis in Emma Doxiadi’s Allegorical ‘Something Like The End of The World’

Personal heartbreak unfolds into urgent social commentary as Emma Doxiadi's genre-straddling short transforms emotional asymmetry into literal collapse.

Animation, Documentary

Ruben Gagliardini Conjures an Animated Chimera to Battle Corporate Cynicism in His Documentary ‘Macchina Continua’

Ruben Gagliardini talks to DN about constructing a hand-drawn machine-as-character to illuminate the human cost of Italy's deindustrialised heartland.

Live Action, Premiere

Firas Itani Charts the Invisible Sisyphean Weight of Everyday Labour in Tense Drama ‘Lower Ground’

Denying any relief, Firas Itani uses framing, contrasting colour & relentless routine to depict skewed power dynamics in his portrait of everyday servitude.

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