© 2008 Directors Notes. 
An eight-year-old boy called Mir Hussain, living in a cave in Bamiyan, Afghanistan may not appear to be the most obvious choice for a feature length documentary but producer/director Phil Grabsky’s film The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan uses Mir’s individual story to show how life is lived by ordinary Afghans post-Taliban [...]
In partial homage to the sensation of dark imagination in the work of Tim Hope, Roman Dirge and Tim Burton, Anita Shukla’s animated short The Scent of Seth portrays beauty and charm in a twisted environment, with its take on the isolation and misery of adolescence and the desire to escape from it.
Produced over [...]
A well-worn maxim suggests that it’s always best to create stories about ‘what you know’, and Yousaf Ali Khan’s accomplished short Talking with Angels goes a long way to show why this is advice best followed. Based on Khan’s own childhood and created with the intention of bucking the social ideals of what constitutes [...]
Mildred is an eccentric, bird-like woman who desperately tries to do her job to the best of her ability – only there’s little to do and the more redundant she becomes, the more she fades into her surroundings – literally. Conceived while working in endless, tedious temping jobs, Miranda Bowen’s short film Stagnate will strike [...]
With two shorts already under her belt (Working for Christmas and Fly), along with several commercials, Candida Scott Knight cast her net wide to find the right script for her next project. “Mercy tells the story of Ben, a young boy who’s bullied at school and neglected at home by his heroine-addict mother. It’s a [...]
“I don’t know anything about that jigga jigga stuff - you play that and I’ll play this!” - Paul Humphrey
What happens when the original old school beat makers meet the new school of hip-hop beat jugglers? Renowned hiphop photographer B+ set the wheels in motion with the inspired idea of bringing together the most revered [...]
Making counting to ten one of the creepiest things ever shown on screen, Brendan Muldowney’s The 10 Steps will have you going to bed with the lights on for the foreseeable future. Shot in Dublin over three days, The Ten Steps uses the horror movie staples of a haunted house, lone baby sitter and unreliable [...]
Remote tells the story of an amalgam of the fairer sex and TV. Despite the modest £1000 budget, director John Burns was confident the 90-second film could be realised on Super 16mm, until disaster struck: “The producer pulled out three days before the shoot and we realised she hadn’t organised anything in the month of [...]
Turning insomnia to his advantage, director Alnoor Dewshi developed the concept for his astounding short 77 Beds whilst finding an alternative to counting sheep, “I got the idea from lying awake one night and trying to count back through all the beds I’d ever slept in – back to and including the bed I [...]
Discovering several great locations whilst on a shoot, director Shane Sheils worked backwards to create a script that would exploit them to the fullest. Marrying his dislike of the corporate office job to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers theme, The Darkside is a classic tale of a free spirit hunted down by a steadily [...]