Although Burke left the BFI in 2020, the Film Fund provided £100,000 in pre-production and £950,000 in production funding for the film, plus £35,000 through its Step Up initiative for crew from underrepresented backgrounds, as part of a total budget around £2m. Mary Burke, then senior executive at the BFI Film Fund which backed iFeatures with BBC Film, introduced Khalid to Juliette Larthe of UK company Prettybird. Of 12 filmmaking teams on the 2019 iFeatures intake, In Camera was one of only two without a producer attached. This film seemed to demand a specific process from the beginning.” “Things feel much more confused, turbulent and heightened. The three-act structure is such a neat way to tell a story, and we live in a messy time,” says the director.

“I wasn’t interested in making a three-act structure, conventional screenplay. Instead of a traditional script with scenes and dialogue, he wrote moments in the film like music tracks, with a side A and side B, and a ‘beat switch’ in the middle, inspired by Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.

Having studied English at the University of Salford, Khalid cut his filmmaking teeth with 2016 short Parts, made in 12 hours with a crew found on Craigslist and then 2018’s Stock, part of Sky Arts’ Art 50 project, which featured artists responding to post-Brexit Britain and saw the lead actor’s visa run out midway through the shoot.įor iFeatures, he made an unconventional submission. “It’s like putting together a puzzle all of the pieces feel very lived-in.” “It consumed my thoughts for a long time,” he says. Khalid had been developing it for four years before he was selected in 2019. The feature is the first from the 2019 iFeatures slate to make it to screen, with the low-budget Creative UK programme still on hiatus having been paused during the pandemic. “There’s a more palatable version of this film I’m just not interested in making that,” says Khalid. The film plays with ideas of reality and identity. In Camera follows Aden, a young actor stuck in a cycle of nightmarish auditions, who takes it upon himself to find a new part to play. Source: Screen International/Zeeshan KhalidĪ combination of support from Creative UK’s low-budget feature scheme iFeatures and UK funders BBC Film and the BFI Film Fund allowed Naqqash Khalid to be as bold as he wished with his debut feature In Camera, which premieres today (July 1) in the Proxima section at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Talk khalid album cover