Venue and date for the shorts programme TBC
UK, 2025
Directed by
Lilly Zhuang
Running time
26 minutes
In East Riding, Yorkshire, seventeen-year-old Kaden reluctantly takes a job at the local strawberry field over the summer. A quiet introvert, Kaden clearly doesn’t fit in with the other farmhands, who are all older, more experienced, and treat him with contempt.
It is here that he encounters Lucas, an aloof eighteen-year-old who has worked at the farm for several summers now. Underneath his initial indifference, Lucas hides a deeper curiosity for Kaden.
Desires disentangle in this new, uninhibited, and sun-drenched environment, as the two boys tentatively begin to explore their feelings towards one another in secret, a kinship that forces them to confront their own internalised homophobia, shame, and sense of belonging.
Meet the director
Lilly Zhuang is an award-winning, Chinese-Dutch filmmaker based in London.
Working across fiction and non-fiction, her debut short film As Far As Our Eyes Can See premiered at the BFI Future Film Festival in 2021 where it was nominated for Best Documentary.
Her fiction directorial debut, Here, premiered at BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival 2025, before being selected at BAFTA-qualifying Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival where the film won the award for Best Director in the short film category.
Growing up in the Netherlands as the daughter of Chinese artists, Lilly has centered her interdisciplinary creative and academic work around the renegotiation of the diasporic nature of identity and belonging. Having graduated with an MA in Film and Philosophy from King’s College London (KCL), she positions her creative work and responsibility at the interstices of politics and media, focussing on projects with sociopolitical and cultural value in, what she calls, our kaleidoscopic media environment.
Drawing from a strength in delicate imagery, Lilly’s work underlines the emotive powers of gestures and environment, of rhythmic and affective storytelling, that roots itself in the intricacies of larger-than-life everyday scenery, centring on the notion of humans in the midst of wider ecologies and discourses.
She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Documentary by Practice at University College London (UCL).
Meet the cast and crew
Starring
Fraser Patrick Kelly
Cameron Dews
Jamie Patterson
Adan Osborne
Tim Zhuang
Kieran Downes
Andy Jones
Writer
Pete Restrick
Producer
Christian Dametto
Production Company
House on Fire Productions
Executive Producers
Kate Shelley
Lu Luo & Zhuang Hong Yi
Sarah Restrick
Timothy Pinnington
Associate Producer
Carsten Vollmers
Editor
Irfan van Tuijl
Sound designer
Alexander Faingold
Director of photography
Hayley Grant
Steadicam operator
Alex Kingston
1st AC
Luke de Borde
2nd AC
Maxwell Whitaker
DIT
Lilly Zhuang
Gaffer
Marta Vitola
Spark
Joseph Wharfe
1st AD
Pete Restrick
Script Supervisor
Pete Restrick
Score and music composition by
Catrin Vincent
Original song by
Catrin Vincent & Pete Restrick
Casting
Lilly Zhuang & Pete Restrick
Consulting casting director
Shakeel Haakim
Sound Recordist
Dan Ellaby
Drone operator
Joel Greenbank
Stunt assistants
Joel Greenbank & Jake Greenbank
Production designer
Ye Lynn Sim
HMU
Amy Rowley
Costume coordinator
Jet Magielse
Colourist
Vanessa Aparicio
Colour Producer
Bella Baillie
