18th british shorts, berlin
BEN LANKESTER
delivery
FESTIVAL SCREENING
Sat 25.1. 19:00 / Acudkino 1
CAST
ROSIE CHAPPEL - Mary
JORDAN KOUAMÉ - Charlie
CHRISTINA BALMER - Helen
AOIFE GASTON - Olivia
Feb, 13, 2025
Newly-qualified midwife Mary experiences the most challenging night shift of her career as she oversees two life-and-death pregnancy cases on an understaffed and under-resourced NHS maternity ward.
Hi Ben, how does it feel to be at the 18th British Shorts, Berlin, with your latest short Delivery?
We’d heard great things about British Shorts over the years so we were very happy to be selected. We also know a lot of fellow filmmakers whose work has been programmed, so it feels great to be sharing the experience with them. As DELIVERY is such a contemporary British story and issue, we always knew it would resonate in the UK, but it always feels particularly special to be recognised and watched by international audiences.
How important are festivals like British Shorts, Berlin, in creating a platform for short films and filmmakers?
The value of festivals like British Shorts can’t be underestimated. Filmmaking can be an endurance test and bringing a film into the world is often long and lonely. Being selected provides a much needed endorphin hit, exposes our film to new audiences and creates a sense of community amongst filmmakers.
Delivery has had an amazing festival run winning multiple awards including Best Drama and Best Director at the 2024 UK Film Awards. Did you imagine your short would get this type of response?
The response to the film has been overwhelming. We knew we’d made something we were proud of and believed we were telling an important story at a prescient time, but the festival run and in particular the awards have been more than we could have imagined. To be nominated at the British Independent Film Awards for Best British Short was particularly surreal.
Can you tell me how Delivery came about? What was the inspiration behind your screenplay?
I first met midwife Rosie Chappel when I directed her in ‘Who’s Counting?’, a fundraising commercial my wife, producer Bophanie Lun, and I developed for UK pregnancy charity Tommy’s. The idea for DELIVERY came to me months later when Rosie posted a photo of her dressed in her scrubs, announcing that she had only five weeks left of her training. I approached her with the idea for the film: a newly-qualified midwife undertaking the most challenging night shift of her career.
Together over the following year, via countless video calls, Google docs, voice notes and text messages and using Rosie’s own lived experience, we developed the story of two pregnancy cases unfolding side by side as a physically and emotionally exhausted midwife attempts to deliver two healthy babies. The ambition was to authentically capture Rosie’s lived experience: the heartbreak ad despair inside the patient rooms, the tension-filled moments inside the operating theatre, and the quiet calm and connection in the spaces midwives often retreat to during these gruelling shifts in increasingly understaffed and under-resourced maternity wards.
Once we’d settled on a rough outline for the two stories, I went away and wrote the script, with Rosie feeding back from both a personal and medical perspective as I went. We were shooting the film roughly a year later, in August 2023.
When shooting a short like Delivery how close do you like to stick to your screenplay? Do you allow yourself/cast some flexibility with the material?
Because this was Rosie’s first leading acting role in a project of this size, we deliberately designed the shooting of the film to accommodate her lack of experience on set. Rather than traditional coverage, we would shoot extended takes of each scene so that she could really settle into the character and essentially get on with her day job as a midwife on screen for as long a period as possible, particularly earlier on in the shooting schedule before we got to the more emotional scenes. A conscious choice was also made not to have rehearsals with the other more experienced actors in order to recreate that veneer of professional distance that Rosie would naturally take on when meeting new patients in real life. Shooting this way, I encouraged the actors to adapt to each other which led to some minor improvisation at times, but generally speaking what you see on screen was there on the page. It was actually in the editing process that things were more malleable and moved around in unexpected ways.
What was the message you wanted to convey with Delivery and do you think you achieved it?
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the message I wanted to convey as I’d like the film to speak for itself, but I can talk about the desire to be as honest and truthful as we could be in telling this story. Because of the unique way the film was devised and executed, we’re confident that that authenticity is baked into the foundations of the film and what audiences see on screen is reflective of a real person trying to make the best of an incredibly challenging situation, one that is all too real for midwives currently working on UK maternity wards.
On a wider level, the film hopefully challenges whether these vocations - that require daily sacrifice for individuals as they give so much of themselves emotionally and physically - can ever be sustainable.
Since your debut short what do you think you’ve discovered about yourself as a filmmaker and storyteller?
The most illuminating thing I’ve learned is that the most important and lasting work is always born out of personal experience. When we made ‘Who’s Counting?’ in 2022 - a film inspired by mine and Bophanie’s own experiences with recurrent miscarriage which Bophanie also produced - it proved to be the beginning of a series of projects in the baby loss space, and one that really kickstarted our narrative careers. We didn’t realise at the time quite how powerful a tool our own personal experience would be. Looking back, whether it’s a music video or even a commercial, my strongest work has always been deeply personal. It always has that connection somewhere.
How essential is the creative collaboration between you and your wife, producer Bophanie Lun, when working on a short like Delivery?
As with Who’s Counting?, our collaboration was crucial in getting DELIVERY off the ground. Based on women’s experiences and centred around fertility and childbirth, both films needed careful handling. And so while I worked with Rosie on the story and eventual script, Bophanie was working creatively across casting and locations, at the same time building both our production and post production teams. From being the casts’ safe space during filming to galvanising multiple departments during a long and gruelling post process, all the way Bophanie worked as a passionate advocate of the film’s message and sensitivity. Historically, our collaborations are generated and driven by me but often end with her being the heartbeat of the project.
During production on DELIVERY, Bophanie and I established Kingdom Born, which is housing our slate of existing and future projects as we work towards our narrative debut feature.
Does your background in commercial and music video help guide your approach to your narrative films?
No matter the eventual output, it’s all storytelling. I started my career as an editor, which was incredibly beneficial in learning how to economically and efficiently tell stories across a variety of mediums straight out of film school. I would say my work in music videos - especially the editing of them - gave me skills in rhythm and pacing, particularly around music, that I use (probably unconsciously) to this day.
"...authenticity will always be at the heart of our ambitions as filmmakers..."
Who are some of the filmmakers that have inspired you?
There are various filmmakers who had a direct influence on how I approached DELIVERY, from the Dardenne Brothers’ commitment to social realism and the way their handheld camera creates an incredible first person perspective and protagonist interiority, to the Safdie Brothers’ work which is obviously well known for creating unease and ever rising stakes through a combined use of escalating camera movement, music and sound design.
But probably the biggest influence was Audrey Diwan’s 2021 film HAPPENING, which although is set in France in the 1960s, was an important reference in terms of capturing a character’s subjectivity through disciplined camera direction, as well as an incredibly powerful sense of growing anxiety and fear through music and editing. When I first saw the film in the cinema, an audience member fainted as he left. We had a similar experience at a screening of DELIVERY at Norwich International Film Festival last year. Although momentarily scary, it did show me that I’d succeeded with my ambitions in making something powerful and affecting using the unique tools cinema allows us.
Moving forward, what themes/subjects do you hope to explore?
Bophanie and I are currently working towards our debut narrative feature, which will be in a similar space to DELIVERY, not just in terms of subject matter but in how we make the film. Ultimately, authenticity will always be at the heart of our ambitions as filmmakers and we will always be driven by stories that we believe need telling.