Writer-director, UK Stars Of Tomorrow

Jonathan Van Tulleken

A man trudges through a barren, snow-covered landscape with his dog. He finds a house, closed up for the winter, breaks in and helps himself to valuables. In the next house he makes a terrifying discovery - a young girl’s frozen body crammed into the fridge. Off Season is a sinister horror short which showcases director Jonathan Van Tulleken’s instincts for cranking up the tension and exploiting the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of a very chilly landscape. He had already caught the eye of festival-goers with his unnerving 2007 drama Bumblebee about a game of hide and seek that goes awry, but Off Season has won him a wider following thanks to its Bafta best short nomination earlier this year. He has recently completed an MFA at Columbia Film School in New York where the discipline of directing a short film every two weeks gave him, he says, “ample opportunity to discover my strengths and more often than not my weaknesses”. Now, this versatile director is developing a feature version of Off Season with Big Talk Productions as well as a number of projects with fellow Stars of Tomorrow Tim Key and Tom Basden which “will explore the idea of combining beautiful visuals and tight directing with extremely divvy comedy”.

Contact Hannah Begbie, United Agents, klaing@unitedagents.co.uk