Ostrich

I love political conspiracy thrillers. Dark rooms, whispered conversations, ruthless power plays; our worst fears as citizens realised in the daunting sense of one-person-against-the-system. I wanted to apply the classical filmmaking of Alan Pakula, Gordon Willis and Sydney Pollack’s 1970s paranoia thrillers (All The President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor) to a contemporary political story, and a genre that’s been lacking a British perspective in recent years. Set in modern Westminster, Ostrich takes on the biggest corruptor of democracy - big money.
It’s scary, daunting subject matter worthy of newspaper articles, books, documentaries and feature length films; Ostrich distills the key themes and facts into a bitesize, unfussy snapshot of a complex and multifaceted topic - made approachable in the guise of a political thriller.

I started writing Ostrich before Brexit, before Trump, before the gut-punch sense of dread every time a news alert pops up on our phones in the middle of the night. It seemed a fanciful exploration of very real political and financial issues, but in the maelstrom that has been the last eighteen months of global news, I feel our dark pessimism wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

An unfathomable amount of passion and hard work by a legion of talented people went into the making of this short film. As a first-time writer-director, I’m indebted to the expertise and skills of dozens of artists and technicians who came together to make a film that had something to say about democracy, and we share our work with gratitude.