The Puddle Man

Toby is a twelve-year-old boy who is evacuated to Dartmoor in the midst of the Second World War. With new fears looming over him, Toby discovers his grandmother Julie’s dark past and a mysterious figure who wanders the moorland

  • J. Joseph Held
    Director
  • J. Joseph Held
    Writer
  • India Pluves
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    15 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    May 15, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    4K Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.35:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - J. Joseph Held

J. Joseph Held (Jacob) is a filmmaker from London. He is known for Reverie, The Rings We Bear and Six Weeks. Held’s short dramas explore complex emotions often through magic realism. He is currently studying Philosophy at University of Bristol.

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Director Statement

The Puddle Man is a story about fear, the kind of fear that
ingers, distorts reality, and even makes us believe strange things. Blending history, magical realism and mystery, the film explores the way fear shapes us and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the unknown.

When I was 18 I had cancer, and the subsequent years that followed were full of fear that the cancer would return and kill me. But fear manifested itself in strange beliefs and I found reconciliation in the idea that there could be magic in the world that would somehow make it so my cancer would never return. I wanted to tell this story to show that sometimes the irrational things we believe when we are scared are real - at least on some level - and should be taken seriously. Perhaps by facing and sharing the things that frighten us we can lessen some of the fear that we feel.

The idea came over time. At the start, I knew that I wanted to make a film about people who were scared. Soon Toby emerged, a boy who had a new fear that his father would die. Then Julie, a woman who had a lingering fear that she would never be able to escape the grief she felt for her late husband. I like history and thought setting the film in Britain in 1940 would give reason for Toby to be scared that his father would die at war and allow Julie’s husband to have died in the First World war. By fusing these characters’ stories in a mysterious world that does not quite make sense I wanted to capture the irrationality of fear.