Sophie Black’s short film Night Owls premiered at the London Short Film Festival and went on to win seventeen awards at festivals around the world.
She didn’t go to film school.
The long way round
Sophie grew up in Belper. No film course, no obvious route in, so she made her own: self-written amateur theatre as a teenager, then film reviews for online publications — one of which Entertainment Weekly picked up in 2013.
Her way onto actual sets was the art department, on independent shorts and features. It’s a useful apprenticeship. You learn how a scene gets built, what it costs, and what’s genuinely possible on the day, long before anyone hands you the responsibility of deciding.
She went on to found her own production company, Triskelle Pictures, which has since been longlisted for a BAFTA.
Magic in ordinary places
A lifelong love of fantasy runs through everything she makes. Her films sit in magical realism — recognisable places, recognisable people, something slightly askew.
BBC East Midlands Today once called her “Belper’s answer to Baz Luhrmann”, which tells you something about the visual appetite. Songbird won Best Direction at the Colorado International SciFi and Fantasy Film Festival in 2019.
The part she actually enjoys
Ask her what she likes most about the job and it isn’t the cameras.
It’s actors. Specifically, building enough trust with a performer that they’ll reach for something real, even when the scene around them involves something impossible. Everything else — the lighting, the colour, the way a camera moves — is in service of getting a character’s inner life onto the screen without anyone having to explain it out loud.
She stayed
Plenty of directors leave for London. Sophie didn’t, and that turns out to be a position rather than an accident. She’s built her reputation in the East Midlands and kept making work here.
Out of the Can named her Best Midlands Filmmaker in 2017. Beeston gave her its Rising Star award the same year. In 2024 she was picked for the first ever BFI NETWORK Midlands Director Lab.
What’s coming
She was one of six directors selected for the NFTS and Prime Video Directors Workshop in 2024, where she wrote and directed Lacuna, starring Sadie Soverall. It’s on its festival run now.
Night Owls was always the pilot for something bigger — a feature called Night Owls & Early Birds, currently in development. There’s a new short, Tokos, raising funds.
The argument underneath it
The thread running through the conversation is about permission. That the films nobody sees are where you actually learn the job, and the work worth making is the work you love — not the work someone finally allowed you to make.
Coming from someone with seventeen awards and no film degree, it’s worth hearing.
Have a listen
This is Stylistic Stories. Conversations with people who make, build and create. Everyone has a story worth telling, and this is your chance to hear it.
