A capacity to tag-team on projects has allowed Georgie Paget and Thembisa Cochrane to produce several international titles
Need to know: From Stoke-on-Trent to Saudi Arabia, Caspian Films producers Georgie Paget and Thembisa Cochrane have travelled far in the first seven years of their company. Fittingly, they met abroad – in Krakow as co-producers on 2016 short Brilliance – and discovered a shared taste and a capacity to tag-team on projects made them a good fit.
Each Caspian Films feature has been different from the last. One through line is the company’s support for female filmmakers and female-focused stories, since its first title, Dictynna Hood’s 2019 family drama Us Among The Stones.
Caspian was selected as a Future30 company by UK union Pact in 2021 – the same year of Claire McCarthy’s Sky Cinema title The Colour Room, written by Claire Peate. It gave a first film role to Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor as Clarice Cliff, a revolutionary in the pottery industry in 1920s England. Paget and Cochrane then broke barriers with Ahd’s My Driver And I, one of the first UK independent features to shoot in Saudi Arabia. Inspired by Jeddah native Ahd’s upbringing and friendship with her family’s driver, the film debuted at the country’s Red Sea International Film Festival in 2024.
Key personnel: Georgie Paget, producer; Thembisa Cochrane, producer; Emily Beynon, associate producer.
Incoming: International co-productions are key to the Caspian model: it is lining up Mia Hansen-Love’s next film If Love Should Die, a biopic of writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, with The Brutalist producers Intake Films from the UK, Poland’s Midmarch Media and France’s Les Films Pelleas.
This summer Caspian wrapped Frank & Louis – a prison drama filmed in the UK and Switzerland that marks the English-language debut of Late Shift director Petra Volpe and is produced with Switzerland’s Zodiac Pictures. Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan lead an international cast that includes Puerto Rican musician René Pérez Joglar; the film will launch next year, with Caspian already discussing a next English-language film with Volpe.
Also in the works are Henry James adaptation The Spoils from White Lines writer Ed Wethered and director Alice Smith; A Room Of Her Own, the debut of Iranian journalist-turned-filmmaker Tara Aghdashloo; historical comedy The Last Invasion, written by Peate, about the last time Britain was invaded; an Africa-set spy thriller from Francis Annan; and Italy-set Second World War feature So The Lovers Could Come Out Again from George Peter Barbari.
Thembisa Cochrane says: “We do a bespoke approach to each project. We’re not exclusively director-led, nor exclusively property-led – we’re agnostic in terms of the project. We finance in unconventional ways; we’ve never done the classic British model.”
Georgie Paget says: “Every country makes films differently. It’s a fascinating learning curve each time. We’re both great believers that more perspective, more brains on a question, will produce more interesting answers.”
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