I am a British director, writer & actor, and The Painting & The Statue is my second short film. The film recently won Best International Short at HollyShorts 2025.
At its heart and in its bones, this film is my celebration of love and its many forms: Of children, family, home, country, art and, simplest of all, that first electric moment of seeing someone remarkable across a crowded room. It is also, importantly, my love letter to those objects that fill our everyday lives with meaning and wonder, but that are all too easily forgotten as the years pass us by…
Throughout my life I have had the good fortune of spending a lot of time in beautiful, old houses. I’ve grown up in them, hidden in their nooks and crannies, tied grown-ups’ shoelaces together under their dinner tables, and gone to sleep in their dog baskets. These strange, rambling places
and the weird and wonderful objects that inhabit them have witnessed every moment of my life’s journey, and without them I would quite simply not be myself. This is their story, and I have tried to treat them as tenderly and with as much nuance as living, breathing human beings, just as my childhood imagination often believed them to be.
I have therefore tried to bring a visual simplicity to my telling of this story to let the objects – and the people that love them – speak loudest. There are elements of intentional theatricality & magical realism in the storytelling, with the onus always on the real. That is my cinematic style, and one I hope to further establish in my future films.
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