Jonathan Van Tulleken

A man trudges through a barren, snow-covered landscape with his dog. He finds a house, closed up for the winter, breaks in and helps himself to valuables. In the next house he makes a terrifying discovery - a young girl’s frozen body crammed into the fridge. Off Season is a sinister horror short which showcases director Jonathan Van Tulleken’s instincts for cranking up the tension and exploiting the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of a very chilly landscape. He had already caught the eye of festival-goers with his unnerving 2007 drama Bumblebee about a game of hide and seek that goes awry, but Off Season has won him a wider following thanks to its Bafta best short nomination earlier this year. He has recently completed an MFA at Columbia Film School in New York where the discipline of directing a short film every two weeks gave him, he says, “ample opportunity to discover my strengths and more often than not my weaknesses”. Now, this versatile director is developing a feature version of Off Season with Big Talk Productions as well as a number of projects with fellow Stars of Tomorrow Tim Key and Tom Basden which “will explore the idea of combining beautiful visuals and tight directing with extremely divvy comedy”.