OUT OF THE PEAT
1.66:1 • black & white • 12’30” • 2025

An amateur archaeologist arrives on a desolate peatland in Lancashire, their mind filled with the strange power that peat-bog waters hold to preserve organic matter. They have come to excavate the peatland. They have come to exhume a body. But, in digging into the peat — and into the past — they unearth much more than mere relics.

The peat holds forgotten histories, uneasy truths, and vast stores of climate-change-accelerating carbon. Reflecting the attempt to document and preserve this landscape via the moving image, the film becomes both a lament and a call to action for local peat-bog restoration and protection.

Directors: Tabitha Carless-Frost, Theo Rollason 
Writer: Tabitha Carless-Frost
Producer: Tate Turnbull     
Cast: Roo Gehring 
DOP: Morgan K. Spencer 
Composer: Richard Skelton
Editor: Anthony Ing
Sound Design: Harry Charlton
Prop Design: Elizabeth Alster
Titles: Cameron Harris 

Acetate Pictures / BFI NETWORK
Shot on location at Chat Moss, Lancashire


Upcoming Screenings:
02/04/25 • Sound of Silent Film Festival, Chicago [with live accompaniment] • Music Box Theater
04/04/25 • Resistance, Margate • Turner Contemporary
28/04/25 • AFSAD International Short Film Festival, Ankara • Büyülü Fener
22/05/25 • Sunrise Film Festival, Lowestoft • Marina Theater

Past Screenings: 
22/03/25 • Trans Film Festival Stockholm • Föreningen Midsommargården
23/01/25 • London Short Film Festival • ICA
22/01/25 • London Short Film Festival • Curzon Soho
21/01/25 • London Short Film Festival • UK
Competition: Panoramics • BFI Southbank NFT1

Listening to Variety
Cinema Rediscovered commission • October 2023 

"My initial interest in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) was the involvement of the experimental writer Kathy Acker. Watching the film at Cinema Rediscovered, I was fascinated by the ways in which Gordon, rather than merely drawing on her talents as a writer, imports Acker’s confrontational performance style into Variety’s narrative itself, through the three erotic monologues that punctuate the film. My video essay examines the role spoken language plays in Variety’s subversion of traditionally male spaces, looking to the origins of these monologues in Acker’s writing broadly and Gordon’s 1981 short Anybody’s Woman specifically."

Inland Empire: Horror and the Poor Image
Vimeo • June 2023

An essay on the terrors lurking in low definition, focusing on David Lynch’s MiniDV nightmare Inland Empire. Adapted from an academic essay available here:

“As a teenager, I inherited a collection of VHS tapes of horror movies my school were getting rid of as they made the switch from video to DVD. Watched in my room on my family’s tiny old TV, these films thrilled and terrified me. Revisiting them in the years since, either in cinemas or at home on Blu-ray disks, I’ve now seen these films as they are “supposed” to be seen by the standards of any cinephile — in high resolution versions, without the “imperfections” of the lower-quality video format. The latter viewings afforded a newfound clarity: I could better appreciate the films’ craft, I could make out every detail in a scene. I could, in short, see more — so why did it feel like something was missing?“