Nell Kavanagh
Director & co-founder
Directs about half the slate and shoots when the room needs to be small. Started as a researcher at a Manchester indie in 2011.
The company
Four people, small crews, long shoots.
We are permanently four, and we crew up per film from the same twenty or so freelancers. Every one of them is named in the credits on this site.
Tom Bracewell
Producer & co-founder
Raises the money, holds the schedule, and does the conversations about consent that nobody enjoys.
Rosa Linden
Director & editor
Joined in 2019 to edit The Gaumont and has directed three films since. Cuts long.
Ade Osei
Director of photography
Available light, two cameras, no lighting truck. Spent eleven weeks at sea for The Grey Belt and lost two bodies to salt water.
How we work
The room stays small.
Most of our films are shot by two or three people. That is not a budget decision — it is the only way somebody forgets you are there, and forgetting you are there is the whole job. A six-person crew in a front room produces a very different film.
We pay contributors. Not a fee for access, which would be wrong, but a proper rate for the days we take from people's lives. It is not standard practice and it should be, particularly when a broadcaster is licensing the result.
We show people the cut. Every contributor sees the film before anyone else does. They do not get a veto — except once, on Everything I Kept, where we gave one in writing before filming and he used it, correctly.
We say what we could not get. If an organisation declined to be interviewed, the film says so plainly rather than implying it with an empty chair.
Working with us
Commissioners, distributors and festival programmers: screeners on request, usually the same day.