Curation & writing

"The 48-hour event is the brainchild of co-directors Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi, and it felt like something similar to the landing and departure of a small UFO: lighting fast; exquisitely odd; and trailblazing the skies in quality."

Little White Lies (read the full article)

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A key interest of mine as a filmmaker and as a curator is 'creative nonfiction film', which I define as any documentary that aims to tell a story and/or express a point of view, rather than simply to educate and inform.

 

In 2024, Kimia Ipakchi and I started The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend, a film festival that celebrates everything documentary can and should be. In our inaugural year, we held the UK Premiere of Zia Anger’s My First Film, Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice, and more, and we hosted a run of Charlie Shackleton’s VR performance As Mine Exactly.

 

In 2025, we hosted the second edition at the Rio Cinema, which included the UK Premieres of Julian Castronovo's Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued and Therese Henningsen's All These Summers. It also featured the first work-in-progress run of Joe Bini's live cinema piece Burden of Other People's Dreams, which Kimia and I produced.

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The festival sprung from the research I did on ‘creative nonfiction’ that started in 2021 when I co-edited the book Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Nonfiction Film, for which I interviewed filmmakers such as Robert Greene and Kirsten Johnson. That book also influenced my 2022 short film Papercut, and has gone on to influence all of my films, which all fall under the banner of 'creative nonfiction'.

 

Other writing and curation on the topic of 'creative nonfiction': 

• 2022 – Saeed Taji Farouky: ‘Cinema plays a big part in our constructions of the political world’ (career profile) for Seventh Row

• 2022 – ‘Down with the solo author!’: The making of Framing Agnes (essay and interview) for Seventh Row

• 2022 – I Didn’t See You There shows you the world through a disabled filmmaker’s eyes (review) for Seventh Row

• 2021 – Welfare (podcast episode) for the Wiseman Podcast

• 2021 – ‘A kind of exorcism’: Angelo Madsen Minax on making North by Current (interview) for Seventh Row

• 2021 – The Creative Nonfiction Film Workshop (curated series of online workshops and screenings) for Seventh Row

• 2021 – No Ordinary Man review: Transgender history gets illuminated in vital documentary (review) for The Film Stage

• 2021 – Lynne Sachs on Film About a Father Who and a career of personal filmmaking (career profile) for Seventh Row

• 2021 – The case for Bo Burnham: Inside as creative nonfiction (essay) for Seventh Row 

• 2021 – Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers on her vital new documentary (interview) for Seventh Row

• 2020 – Dreams of a Life (essay) for Cinema Year Zero

"This was a masterclass in opening a film festival, an immediate romp, DIY top-to-bottom, filled with oddities and the most fun I’ve had inside a cinema this year."

Little White Lies (read the full article)

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'Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet' is the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend's one-night-only programme of digital delights on the big screen, showcasing the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet.

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We started 'Chronically Online' as the opening night of the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend in London, and since we've started touring the country with it, collaborating with and mentoring young film programmers in each city in order to adapt the programme every time.

 

So far we've toured Bristol, Belfast, and Brighton — with a special guest online video creator in each city, including Paul Weedon, the guy who said "I can't believe you've done this; and Harry, the star of the viral video Charlie Bit My Finger.

 

The programme will never be the same twice — as unpredictable as a social media scroll. From vlogs to memes to uncategorisable curiosities, these videos might not have initially been intended as ‘cinema’, but what is cinema if not images and narratives that are so iconic that they stick in our heads?

The ‘Chronically Online’ screenings so far have been presented in partnership with the BFI National Archive’s Our Screen Heritage Project, supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.

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Screenings: 

• 2026 – Fabrica in Brighton, in collaboration with the Fresh Perspectives young film programmers (upcoming)

• 2026 – 'Rip It Up' takeover day at the BFI Southbank in London

• 2026 – Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast, in collaboration with the LUMI young film programmers

• 2026 – Watershed in Bristol, in collaboration with the young film programmers at Watershed

• 2025 – The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend at the Rio Cinema in London

In March 2025, I was the co-curator of a UK tour with renowned personal documentary filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, which I worked on under the banner of The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend. We flew Zahedi to the UK for a week of screenings in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, culminating with the World Premiere of Season 3 of The Show About the Show at the Prince Charles Cinema. The Q&A was hosted by Desiree Akhavan.

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A highlight was the interactive screening of The Show About the Show that we ran in Leeds, in collaboration with Rat Depot. In between each episode, audience members were inviting to enter another room and perform a 'camera address' reaction to what they'd just seen, which would be projected live onto the screen. When he felt inspired to, Zahedi would do the same. It was an exploded version of a Q&A, putting the audience up on screen along with the art. We wrote about the screening for the Independent Cinema Office.

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The tour was written about in Little White Lies (online) and POV Magazine (print and online).

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But that wasn't the end of it. Zahedi came back to the UK in June 2025, where we screened work-in-progress excerpts of his long-in-the-works passion project Ulysses & I, at the Theatreship venue in Canary Wharf. There, he met his now girlfriend, novelist Adelaide Faith.

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In November 2025, Zahedi returned to the UK to visit Faith, and we took them to the Close-Up Film Centre for an event titled 'Nobody Loves Anyone More than Adelaide Faith Loves Caveh Zahedi'. It was a live reading where each of them relayed accounts of their relationship from their own differing perspectives.

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Related writing: 

• 2025 – Nobody Loves Anyone More Than CNFW Loves Caveh Zahedi (essay), programme notes written in collaboration with Kimia Ipakchi for audience members at our live reading with Zahedi and Adelaide Faith

• 2025 – Altered States (essay) for Cinema Year Zero, also published in print as part of their Ken Russell edition

• 2025 – The Screening About the Screening: The value of interactive screenings of controversial work (essay) for the Independent Cinema Office

• 2025 - Programme notes (essay) for our UK tour with Caveh Zahedi

In 2019, I co-edited the book Peterloo in Process: A Mike Leigh Collaboration, the first book to take a 360° look at Leigh’s unique filmmaking process. While other books have talked extensively to the man himself, our book included not just interviews with him but with his key collaborators (cinematographer, costume designer, productions designer, makeup and hair designer, and of course, actors). Most recently, I was asked to be a repeat guest and consultant on Devised and Directed: The Films of Mike Leigh, a podcast retrospective of Leigh’s work by Ian Moran.

 

Other writing and curation:

• 2021 – Naked (podcast episode) for the Seventh Row Podcast

• 2020 – Lockdown Film School with Mike Leigh (livestream masterclass) for Seventh Row

• 2020 – Lockdown Film School with Suzie Davies & Stéphane Collonge (livestream masterclass) for Seventh Row

Kelly Reichardt is a favourite filmmaker of mine, and I co-edited the first non-academic book on her work, Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt’s Broken American Dreams. For that book, I conducted a few career-spanning interviews with Reichardt and spoke to many of her collaborators, including Jon Raymond and Lily Gladstone. I also wrote essays on several of her films, such as First Cow, Certain Women, and Old Joy.

 

Other writing and curation:

• 2022 – Kelly Reichardt (magazine feature) for Beneficial Shock

• 2021 – First Cow and the work of Kelly Reichardt (podcast episode) for Girls on Film

• 2020 – Certain Women (podcast episode) for Intermission

• 2020 – Lockdown Film School with April Napier & Grace Snell (livestream masterclass) for Seventh Row

• 2020 – Review: Kelly Reichardt's First Cow and dreamers thwarted by capitalism (review) for Seventh Row