2025: The Long Hot Winter

This year in the UK, we had a blistering heatwave in February, summer temperatures in the depths of winter. To see flowers blooming in February, the sun beaming overhead felt very wrong indeed. Nature is knocked out of rhythm and I couldn’t help thinking about what the cultural implications of this will be. England's a green and pleasant land of rain and mud, it is ingrained in our national psyche. Yet the years since 2016 have been the four hottest on record. I began dreaming of a white hot Christmas...

I wanted to make a cinematic, playful short film, while delivering a powerful message about climate change. A fictional, lovingly photographed vision from the near-future that will showcase urban dwellers of all backgrounds that we recognise and love, but will reveal many of them to be as much in denial as we are now.

In life, it feels like the lines between reality and fiction are increasingly blurring. Things that were beyond our wildest imaginings only a few years ago, are now a reality. We wanted to try and achieve a storytelling form that reflects this, in blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. As old orthodoxies are challenged and thrown out, it seems like an exciting time to reach for unusual modes of storytelling.

While there was a script as a base, we were making a multi-protagonist film about community and wanted the process to truly be collaborative and organic. We developed a method where we worked with streetcast non-actors to improvise and co-write their scenes around a base story. Giving it the spontaneous feel of documentary, while guiding them enough to deliver the emotional beats. We wanted to ensure authenticity: for the younger cast, we went to Youth Centres, for the old women, to an old people’s home in Earls Court. We wanted to get away from the singular control of a formal script or a director into something more genuinely communal in its creation.

Child actors were central to the energy of this film. We cast them from London youth clubs and theatre groups like the legendary Chickenshed Theatre in West London. I am still working with those young actors on other projects. We have developed an impact campaign for the film with a specifically youth focus, supported by BFI/Doc Society and developed with Cosmic Cat (I, Daniel Blake, Sorry We Missed You, Nae Pasaran!) We have developed an event to screen 2025 to school kids, followed by a celebrity-moderated Q&A streamed to schools across the UK. We have letters of intent from over a dozen schools who wish to take part and have worked with teachers to develop a lesson plan for both Biology and English/Drama, using the film as a starter. Once we have a UK festival premiere confirmed we will put this plan, supported by BFI/Doc Soc, in motion.