Dom Bridges

Dom Bridges has forged a successful career as a commercials and promos director but he now wants to graduate to longer-format film-making. A fan of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, his early ads were government information films shot in a social-realist style - “My showreel was the probably the saddest, most depressing collection of commercial work in the UK” - but his fiction work is taking him in a lighter direction. Bitch is an amusing drama about a man who finds there is more to a sweet old lady than meets the eye. Now he is working on another short, comedy love story Hala, funded by prize money from Smoke & Mirrors’ 48 Hour Film competition, won with his short The Norm. He is also working on a feature adapted from a story by Chris Paling, and developing a sitcom with the BBC. Commercials, he says, have been “a perfect place to learn, working with actors, camera equipment and story construction, [but] films allow you to share something emotional with an audience”.