Growing up on a council estate in Glasgow fuelled Sean Lìonadh’s creative urge. “I wanted to create something slightly magical, to perhaps escape some of the deep, dark Scottish childhood memories,” says the filmmaker, who has signed a development deal with Film4 and Screen Scotland for his first feature.
Announced as an arthouse horror film, Nostophobia explores the intimate and surreal relationship between two gay men in Glasgow. “Nostophobia is the fear or reluctance of returning home,” says Lìonadh. “My film explores that and the way we use love to escape ourselves.”
At 16, Lìonadh left school and ended up at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, but dropped out after a year. Desperate to make films, he formed the Young Filmmakers Glasgow collective and promoted it online. “We met once a week in cafes, anyone could come,” he says. Members pooled equipment and skills and began making short films with no budget; this landed Lìonadh a job in BBC Scotland’s digital department.
There he produced short-format digital content – especially Time for lovebased on his experiences with homophobia. The film has been viewed 16 million times online and used as a teaching tool in schools around the world. In 2019, it won a Royal Television Society Scotland award.
Lìonadh left the BBC shortly afterwards and made a zero-budget documentary Be silentwhich captures the first day of lockdown in Glasgow. With BFI partner Short Circuit, he created the BIFA 2022 award-winning short film Too roughabout a man who wakes up hungover and hysterical next to his boyfriend because he has to hide him from his broken family. “Exploring shame in my characters and showing how it’s a kind of illness that prevents me from socializing and being intimate with people is part of my creative drive.”
Lìonadh cites the French Nouvelle Vague and the works of Rose Glass, Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay as his sources of inspiration. He is determined to write female characters, “but I always end up with two men,” he says. “But I’ll get there.”
Contact: Liam Francis Quigley, 42
