Private Project

White Girl

Beth, a fifteen-year-old white girl, is seemingly lost. Over the course of an evening on the streets of East London, her interactions with the city's dwellers take darker turns. Terror appears to lie around every corner. But Beth is the real monster lurking within our city.

  • Nadia Latif
    Director
  • Omar El-Khairy
    Writer
  • Brett Webb
    Producer
  • Deepa Keshvala
    Cinematographer
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    12 minutes 43 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 19, 2019
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Nadia Latif

Nadia Latif is a theatre maker and film director. She trained as a director at RADA under Bill Gaskill. She has worked with writers including Abi Morgan, Harold Pinter, Ella Hickson, Brad Birch, Ben Ockrent and Naomi Wallace. She has worked for buildings including the Almeida, Royal Shakespeare Company, National, Bush, Theatre503 and Arcola. She has worked on some short documentaries, and is currently developing a number of film and television projects. She dabbles in journalism, writing about the intersections of race, gender and popular culture. She is Associate Director of the Young Vic theatre in London, and a 2019 Screen Star Of Tomorrow.

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Director Statement

White Girl is about subverting audience expectations of the narratives and genres accessible to artists of colour. What might a “black” horror film really look like? Is blackness about who makes a film, who watches a film, or how we watch it? For too long artists of colour have only been invited to make ghettoised narratives - critiquing their own communities through kitchen sink realism. As artists of colour we have long thought - when do WE get to criticise YOU? We want to show solidarity with the terrors of PoC through how well we understand the monster of whiteness, and particularly in this story, the horrors of white feminism as it impacts on PoC. This is a film as much about how we uphold white women as it is about the fears the reside in everyday interactions for PoC. There is a tension between the film’s white protagonist and the fleeting black and brown folk who haunt the film - leaving a ghostly trail of unspoken pain and resistance to the commercial forces of change in the area.