Behind the Film: Poppy - Worcester Film Festival

Introduction:

Poppy is a dark, emotionally charged drama exploring the blurred lines between love and addiction. Representing both a real woman and a metaphor for heroin, Poppy embodies the complex nature of desire and the devastating consequences of loving something that may ultimately destroy you. Poppy is based on a short story and inspired by true events.

Inspiration:

Eleven years ago, the director met Claudia while working on a documentary book project inside German prisons. On paper, Claudia’s story sounded familiar: addiction, incarceration and recovery. Yet when she submitted a short story titled Morph for the book, the director was struck by the quality of her writing. A story written in the form of a letter, addressed to the love of her life – heroin. 11 years later, Poppy was born.

The Process:

Filming took place across Hertfordshire and London over a short, intensive shoot. As an independently produced, self-funded short, one of our biggest challenges was creating a film that felt visually rich and emotionally intimate while working within a very limited budget and schedule. Every creative decision therefore had to balance the director’s vision with what we could realistically achieve.

The 1990s caravan scenes were particularly important to us. Because so much of the story is experienced through Claudia’s memories, the production design, lighting and colour palette had to help create a world that felt both seductive and slightly removed from the present. We used warmer tones and a subtle, slightly dated film texture for these scenes, while the 2012 parole office was deliberately colder and more restrained. The parole office presented a different kind of challenge. Rather than finding an inherently cinematic space, we took an ordinary office environment and completely reinvented it through production design. Our art department transformed the space into a believable parole office, creating a distinct visual world while working within the same production constraints. This allowed us to achieve the contrast between Claudia’s remembered past and her present reality without compromising the overall production value.

The intimate scenes were approached with the same level of care. We worked with an intimacy coordinator and put rehearsals, safeguarding measures and a closed-set protocol in place, allowing the performers to approach difficult material with trust, clarity and control. This was particularly important given the emotional and physical vulnerability required by the story.
One of the most rewarding parts of making Poppy was seeing all these small, practical decisions come together to support the central metaphor, allowing the world of the film to feel intimate, seductive and increasingly unsettling without explaining everything to the audience.

What It Means to Be a Finalist:

It’s wonderful to see the project being recognised after so much love and sweat has gone into it. Festivals like Worcester are such an important platform for indie film and emerging filmmakers. Thank you.