Stars of Tomorrow 2023: Danielle Goff (producer)

Since graduating with an MA in producing from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in 2021, Danielle Goff has been firing up a slew of projects that give authentic representation to the communities she champions. “All of my projects focus on stories and subjects who are working class, queer, Bipoc [Black, Indigenous and people of colour], or living with disabilities or neurodivergence,” says Goff, who set up her own Lunar Pictures last year.

These projects include queer road-trip comedy drama Mama, directed by Laura Jayne Tunbridge (a screenwriter who also directed 2021 short Dragged Up, produced by Goff); Edem Wornoo’s sci-fi Nova, about a young Black man drifting from his council flat towards death; and Nosa Eke’s King Of The Court, a body horror period piece Goff bills as “exploring gender and sexuality through the Black female queer lens”.

Goff hails from Mitcham, south London, and is of Jamaican, Algerian and British heritage. Her life experiences outside of the film industry have informed her approach to producing.

“To be a producer, you must have tenacity. You also need to care for people,” she reflects. “I’ve been a carer for both my mum and my sister from a very young age, which has given me a lot of attributes that mean I can work well in stressful situations, and am a natural problem solver. I want to do more work to look at what we can do for the next generation and bringing people up, and carers is one area that I don’t think is spoken enough about in the industry.”

Goff attended NFTS with a ScreenSkills scholarship, and was elected student union president. Here, she met her mentor Rebecca O’Brien of Sixteen Films. Since completing her MA, Goff has worked as producer’s assistant/associate producer at Faye Ward’s Fable Pictures and taken part in Edinburgh’s 2022 Talent Lab, BFI London Film Festival’s Network@LFF, and NFTS and Disney’s short-form incubator Disney Imagine. Her credits to date include producing Ida Melum’s Bafta- and Bifa-nominated animated short Night Of The Living Dread, and five short films on the DBK Studios Unearthed Narratives slate, for the UK’s Sky Studios.

“I’m working with people who are open for me to come in and have a voice,” says Goff. “First and foremost, I’m a storyteller. I don’t ever want to just come in and be completely nuts and bolts. I like to get stuck in.”

Contact: Georgia Kanner, Independent Talent