Cheese on Toast

In a blindingly yellow shoe store, two apathetic shop girls, Lou and Mindy, kill time on a dead-end shift until a corpse tumbles out of a cupboard. What follows is a macabre, spiral where comfort curdles into decay. A derpy comedy about apathy, self-interest, and the absurd lengths we go to avoid doing the right thing.

  • Katy-May Hudson
    Director
    Pete's Valve, Just a Step Away, The 5 Ants who Live in my Apartment
  • Erin Davoren Lewis
    Writer
    The Stylist
  • Jeremy Lowrencev
    Producer
    With Love, Lottie
  • April Rose Desalegn
    Key Cast
    "Mindy"
    The Eviction, Havent you heard everyone hates me
  • Scarlet Lindsay
    Key Cast
    "Lou"
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    November 17, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    150,000 AUD
  • Country of Origin:
    Australia
  • Country of Filming:
    Australia
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    ARRI
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - AFTRS
Director Biography - Katy-May Hudson

Katy-May Hudson is an award-winning filmmaker and AFTRS Masters candidate, crafting bold, feminist stories for screen and stage through a surreal, darkly comic lens.

She is the Founder/Festival Director of The Brooklyn Women's Film Festival, Former Co-Artistic Director of the downtown experimental theater collective The New York Neo Futurists, a recipient of the Coca Cola Refreshing Films Program, the SVA Alumni Scholarship Award and winner of the Best of Fest Award at SVA Theater, NYC.

katy-mayhudson.com

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Director Statement

Cheese on Toast (a collaboration between NIDA and AFTRS 2025 Masters students) is a comedy about apathy and how the comfort of doing nothing can lead to our demise.

Two shop girls. One corpse. Forty-five minutes left on shift. Beneath the slapstick absurdity lies a parable about choosing comfort over conscience. Lou and Mindy’s binary, chaos and order, fuels the comedy as their passivity and self-interest fester within a fluorescent, suffocating retail fishbowl.

Visually, the world is claustrophobic, hyper-controlled: a monochromatic yellow nightmare- kitsch, pop art, nauseatingly saccharine.

I want the audience to laugh, then question why. Cheese on Toast asks what happens when “self-care” curdles into self-absorption, when comfort becomes complicity. Because we all have a little Lou and Mindy in us, right?