Growing up in a Glasgow housing scheme fuelled Sean Lìonadh’s drive to create, “to make something slightly magical, to maybe escape some of the deep, dark Scottish childhood memories”, says the filmmaker, who has signed a development deal for his first feature with Film4 and Screen Scotland.
Billed as an arthouse horror, Nostophobia examines the intimate and surreal relationship between two gay men in Glasgow. “Nostophobia is a fear or aversion of returning home,” says Lìonadh. “My film explores that, and the way we use love to escape ourselves.”
Having left school aged 16, Lìonadh landed at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland but dropped out after a year. Desperate to make films, he set up the Young Filmmakers Glasgow collective, advertising it online. “We would meet once a week in cafés, it was open to anyone to show up,” he says. Members pooled equipment and skills and started making zero-budget shorts; it led Lìonadh to a job in BBC Scotland’s digital department.
There he produced digital shortform content — most notably Time For Love, based on his experiences of homophobia. It attracted 16 million views online and was used as an educational resource in schools all over the world, winning a Royal Television Society Scotland award in 2019.
Lìonadh left the BBC shortly after and made zero-budget documentary Silence, capturing the first day of lockdown in Glasgow. With BFI partner Short Circuit, he created BIFA 2022-winning short Too Rough, about a man who wakes up next to his boyfriend, hungover and hysterical as he must conceal him from his dysfunctional family. “Exploring shame in my characters, and how it’s a kind of disease getting in the way of connecting and being intimate with people, is part of my creative drive.”
Lìonadh cites the French New Wave and the work of Rose Glass, Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay among his inspirations. He is determined to write female characters, “but I always end up stuck with two men,” he says. “But I’ll get there.”
Contact: Liam Francis Quigley, 42
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