Christmas [2020]

A Bella & Monica short film.

"Alone at Christmas, a colourful soul writes a letter to his Mum whilst contemplating the troubles of the present and secretly nursing some pain from the past."

So. I used to work in a scare maze on London's South Bank. This is one of many rites of passage for any struggling actor. In it, we were given free reign to come up with pretty much whatever characters we wanted, to serve a story that more often than not we made up ourselves. Pretty much the whole time, we had fun scaring the crap out of poor foreign visitors who couldn't understand what the hell we were doing, or why I was playing a very strange character that looked not unlike Heath Ledger's joker, but acted nothing like him and certainly didn't sound sound anything like him.

This is where Bella was born. I'm not going to try and describe him much further, because really the character and motivations behind it reveal themselves much better through just watching the films. In a nutshell, you could describe Bella as a warrior for maintaining the innocence and positivity of a person that is inevitably stripped away in the onsurge of life for a lot of working class people. There is a whole film ready to be shot from a script I've written, and one of my very best friends plays the character of Monica, who is vital to the telling of the story and practically inseparable from who Bella is. 'Bella & Monica' is currently my baby, and it's this that all my other projects are working towards. This is part 1 of a trilogy of shorts I've made to raise awareness for the feature, and parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.