Sunday Nights

My latest short film Sunday Nights is finished and is ready for festivals. You can watch the film here. And I posted some behind the scenes images here.

This is my most personal short to date.

Sunday Nights is a film about what we inherit from the people who leave us. Set during a single walk on the day of a funeral, it explores how the absence of a parent doesn't simply create a gap. It shapes everything that grows around it. The way a person learns to take up space. The way they love. The way they disappear when things get hard.

The film sits with the particular grief of losing someone you never really had. Its central character isn't mourning a father so much as mourning the relationship that never existed, and confronting, for the first time, how much that loss has steadily governed his life. The conversation he never got to have becomes the one he has with his mother, in fragments, across a walk through the cemetery grounds as the light fades.

At its core, Sunday Nights is about the moment a person recognises a pattern and chooses to meet it. Not dramatically. Not with resolution. But with the careful, frightened resolve of someone who understands what's at stake, and decides, in spite of everything, to try.

Director’s statement

Some stories begin with an absence.

I grew up with a father who was there but not quite present, a man of few words and simple habits. The choices he made, about family, about faithfulness, about what gets left unsaid, shaped the choices I was determined not to make.

When he died, I sat in the funeral service and realised how much had never been said between us. How much never would be.

Sunday Nights grew out of that silence. It is not an autobiographical film. Much of it comes from my own experience, but I expect it'll be recognisable to people who've lived something similar. It asks whether damage passes down through families like a language no one chose to learn, and whether, when you finally see the pattern, you can still choose to break it.

I wanted to make something that sits with discomfort rather than resolving it, where the most important things happen in the spaces between words.

We are all, in some way, still becoming our parents. This film asks what we do when we notice.