‘Learning To Breathe Under Water’ is screening at Karlovy Vary and Galway Film Fleadh.
UK production company Shudder Films is on the festival circuit this summer with Rebekah Fortune’s Learning To Breathe Under Water, playing at Karlovy Vary and the Galway Film Fleadh in the space of a week.
It comes at a time of evolution for the company that has credits including Kneecap and God’s Own Country. Until now, Shudder has been a tight-knit team of two, with founder Jack Tarling in London and Northern Irish producer Dermot O’Dempsey, who joined three years ago, based in Newcastle, in the north east of England.
Belfast-based Shereen Ali has now joined as international development producer. Ali was previously a co-producer and head of production at Fred Films, working on features including Fisherman’s Friends and Blithe Spirit. The hire has been supported by a £97,500 award from the UK Global Screen Fund to develop the company’s international focus and slate.
“I was keen to bring in somebody who had experience on a slate of bigger, commercial-facing films,” explains Tarling.
As part of the company’s international co-production ambitions, Shudder has optioned Aminah Hart’s memoir How I Met Your Father in partnership with Leila Lack at Anahita Studios. Shudder is speaking to writers, directors and Australian partners, and recently took meetings about the project at the inaugural Partner With Australia (UK) event in London.
Shudder typically shoots a feature a year and has between five and 10 films on its development slate at any one time. It has optioned Irish author and playwright Frank O’Connor’s short story In The Train, to co-produce with regular Irish partner Patrick O’Neill at Wildcard. (O’Connor’s 1931 short Guests Of The Nation inspired 1992 Oscar and Bafta winner The Crying Game.)
Fateme Ahmadi’s directorial debut Daughter Of Eden, a co-production with the UK’s Lunapark Pictures and Ireland’s Newgrange Pictures, is now in post. Yasmin Al-Khudhairi, Hiam Abbass and Amir El-Masry star in the psychological thriller about a British-Iraqi nurse. It is set in London in 2006 but shot in Dublin.
Irish charm
Tarling met Learning To Breathe Under Water filmmaker Fortune in 2018 while they both attended the same international festivals; Tarling with God’s Own Country, and Fortune with Just Charlie. After talking about potential collaborations for a while, it took a social media callout from Fortune for projects on which they could work together for them to find their project when a spec script came in from writer Richard Brabin.
Learning To Breathe Under Water is set in Ireland and stars Rory Kinnear as a father and artist dealing with the grief of losing his wife while trying to raise his eight-year-old son, played by Ezra Carlisle. Their lives are transformed by the arrival of a Bulgarian au pair, played by Maria Bakalova. The film was shot across 26 days in the west of Ireland in autumn 2024, including at Galway’s disused airport.
Although Brabin’s original script did not specify Ireland as the location, Tarling saw an opportunity.
“Partly for funding reasons,” he explains. ”I had a good experience making Kneecap in Ireland, I knew how things worked and had good relationships, and was keen to work again with [Kneecap co-producer and distributor] Wildcard. Also, Galway is a nice, manageable town and a very creative place full of artists; it felt like the kind of place that Rory Kinnear’s character might live.”
After deciding to shoot in the west of Ireland, Heather Higgins and Ivan McMahon’s Galway-based Éiru Films joined as co-producers. Higgins is also director of development at the Galway Film Fleadh and nominee of the Fleadh’s Bingham Ray New Talent Award for her work as a producer. (Éiru is currently in production in Galway on Irish-language mystery drama series Ar Ais Arís, with Ireland’s Tailored Films and Portugal’s BeActive, distributed internationally by Beta Film.)
Learning To Breathe Under Water thus accessed support from the Western Region Audiovisual Producers (WRAP) Fund, as well as from Screen Ireland.
Bankside Films boarded as international sales agent before the cast was locked in and Tarling received a £192,000 grant for the project from the UK Global Screen Fund’s international co-production strand.
Welsh regional fund Ffilm Cymru was also interested in the project, so Cardiff-based Nan Davies of One Wave Films joined as a co-producer, unlocking some Welsh financing.
The modestly budgeted film still had a gap. From an early stage, the creative team knew scenes of stop-motion animation would be important in telling the story. “It’s a way to try and see certain things through the eyes of a child, a child who – while no label is put on it in the film – is probably neurodiverse, and is something Rebekah, who is autistic herself, felt and connected with in the material,” explains Tarling.
This led the team to Dutch animator Roos Mattaar. Amsterdam-based KeyFilm subsequently joined as a co-producer. Post work took place in the Netherlands, unlocking backing from the Netherlands Film Fund. Further funding came from the UK’s Finite Films and Three Point Capital.
“We’re looking at bigger projects”
Tarling started his career as a line producer before lead producing Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country in 2017. It grossed around £1m at the UK-Ireland box office for Picturehouse to become the highest-grossing UK debut in the territory that year. Kneecap was also a box- office hit, garnering over £2m in the UK-Ireland in 2024 for Curzon and Wildcard.
“We’re looking for things that feel inventive,” says Tarling of what makes a Shudder film.
He has a pipeline to emerging talent through his role overseeing the National Film and Television School (NFTS) six-month evening course, Producing Your First Feature Film. But while mentoring the next generation of producers and working on some debuts remains core to his work, Tarling wants to scale up the Shudder slate.
“We’re looking at doing bigger projects,” he says. “We will still keep a place on the slate for debuts, but we’re keen to work with more established talent going forward.”
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