Aesthetik
information
BEFORE THE BED, BEFORE THE KNIFE (post production) a shadowed, fever dream about the realisation that an intense relationship once obsessed over, a foundation of your daily life, has irreversibly changed everything.
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Projects in development including the personal revenge drama SOLID STATE (feature) examining the fucked up heart of the American dream in Silicon’s Valley Palo Alto and THUS FROM MY LIPS (short) a pandemic drama set in the Soho Hotel as Eshal and Rayaan attempt to overcome their fear of intimacy by role playing a scene from Romeo & Juliet.
Previous films include THE ELECTRICITY IN ME starring Ellora Torchia playing the broken raging heart of my birth mother who I never knew and THIS IS REAL, a spoken word piece by young men East London with music from Burial’s iconic Untrue which screened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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Starring Ellora Torchia portrayed the broken heart of my birth mother, Joan, who I never knew (but was given her personal journals by her partner who held her hand when she died at the age of 37) in a single take 6 minute monologue that won three awards, screened in over 20 festivals including premiering at the iconic Chinese Theater at Hollyshorts Festival in LA.
official selections
HollyShorts (Premiere) (Los Angeles, US)*, New Hampshire Film Festival*, Leeds International Film Festival*+**, Norwich Film Festival**, North East Film Festival***; Cinefest (Sudbury, Canada)****, New York Shorts (NYC, US) ****, Burbank (Los Angeles, US), Cornwall, Crystal Palace, DUMBO (NYC), Ealing, Earl’s Court, London Film Week, London Super Shorts, Lonely Seal, Northampton, Oxford, Shorts Not Pants (Toronto, Canada), World Of Film (Glasgow, UK) //Awards Best Film – London Film Week, Best UK Film – London Super Shorts, Best Actor – Cornwall Film Festival //Accreditations *Academy/Oscar qualifying / **BAFTA & BIFA qualifying / ***BIFA qualifying / ****Canada Screen Award qualifying //Online Amazon Prime, Director’s Library, Director’s Notes
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SOLID STATE [feature]
A personal revenge story, set in Palo Alto, the epicentre of Silicon Valley and the last true frontier of the American dream.
Field research to date includes interviewing in person in and around Palo Alto/Mountain View/Menlo Park a series of big tech/ FAANG engineers and managers (Google/ex Apple, Meta), a startup guy, a Meta marketeer, electrical and motherboard/semiconductor engineers and a UX designer; background source material includes Malcolm Harris’s comprehensive Palo Alto: A History of California Capitalism, and the World.
The LA Times said this about Palo Alto and Malcolm Harris’s writing—
Malcolm Harris had the good luck to grow up in Palo Alto, a blessed piece of real estate in the American economy, lit by both the sun of Silicon Valley and the rosy sandstone glow of the Stanford University campus. He also had the good luck to make it out alive. In the years Harris attended Palo Alto High, students killed themselves at a rate between four and five times the national average, walking to their deaths on the train tracks that Leland Stanford built to escape the labor unrest of San Francisco more than 100 years earlier.