It’s been a busy summer for Miranda Stern, who has been directing a short documentary about workshops that empower women with experience of addiction and/or prison to explore their emotions through fictional identities. It is fully funded by the Doc Society’s Made of Truth fund. “I wanted to do something quite hopeful about recovery,” she says.
Stern, who has drawn on her own experience of heroin addiction and recovery for her films, including 2023 Bafta Scotland-nominated short Clean, notes there is “power in coming together”.
“There’s something that happens in recovery, if you’re lucky, and it’s something quite special and profound, life-changing and creative,” she explains. “I was interested in that because I think we glamorise that dark descent into addiction.”
Stern began making films during the pandemic. “There were schemes where you could borrow cameras, so I started taking stills and realised you could take clips and put them together and set down a story. I found this form of expression that I love,” she says. An MA in directing from the National Film and Television School followed, where she made short documentary Two Copper Wires and 2025 Bafta-nominated graduation short Milk.
Stern — whose recent shorts include Static, a moving drama about addiction and co-dependency, and Revert, which charts a single father’s struggle with parenthood — is also in early development on a literary adaptation with 2022 Rising Stars Scotland producer Reece Cargan.
She is working on another scripted project which sees her exploring new subject matter at an elevated budget. It is about to go into production and Stern says: “there are recurring themes of alienation and agency, but we are also exploring a more heightened visual language than before.”
Stern loves working with actors, saying Kathy Burke and Harriet Walter are among her favourites. “I admire actors for their capacity to be storytellers with every ounce of their being,” she adds. “It’s a suspension of reality but even though you’re finding something fictional, it’s so real. There’s this weird tension.”
Stern says she is interested in “the margins, the misfits, the weirdos, messy girls, messy lives, messy emotions”, and enjoys the liminal space that can exist between fiction and documentary. Making a film, she adds, “should feel a bit dangerous”.
Contact: Miranda Stern
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