Five NFTS Graduates Featured in Screen Stars of Tomorrow 2023!

The National Film and Television School (NFTS) takes immense pride in nurturing and developing outstanding talent in the field of film and television. We are thrilled that five of our remarkable graduates have been featured in Screen International’s annual Stars of Tomorrow list. This prestigious talent showcase has been instrumental in recognising emerging UK and Irish talent both in front of and behind the camera, for the past two decades.

The group join a list of now over 40 NFTS alumni who have previously been named Screen Stars of Tomorrow, including Alice Seabright, writer and director of BBC/Amazon Studios’ Chloe and Netflix’s Sex Education, and Mdhamiri á Nkemi who was recently shortlisted twice at the Young Directors Award for his short original skin, made in partnership with NFTS and BBC Film.

We couldn't be prouder to see more of our alumni making waves in the industry! Below, we introduce you to these five remarkable individuals who are shaping the future of film and television.

Meet them below!

 

Nathan Bryon – Writer

Nathan is an accomplished writer and storyteller, earning a well-deserved place on the Stars of Tomorrow list. Having studied the NFTS Writing and Producing Comedy Diploma, Nathan’s unique voice and compelling narratives have resulted in the critically acclaimed comedy Rye Lane which he co-wrote. He has a number of solo projects currently in the works as well as working closely on various scripts with his writing partner Tom Melia, including Nat And Dan Bought A Van (working title), a comedy they are writing for Vertigo Films. Other scripts in development together include a zombie horror-comedy “with big action sequences” for BBC Film and Pulse Films; a time-travel picture called Bad Time that will mark the feature directing debut of acclaimed music video director Henry Scholfield; and Broke, an original series about twentysomethings for MindsEye.

 

Danielle Goff – Producer

2021 NFTS Producing MA graduate Danielle has already established herself as a powerhouse producer, with the films she made at the NFTS going on to achieve huge success at festivals and awards worldwide. This includes a BAFTA nomination in 2022 for graduate animation film, Night of the Living Dread. Danielle set up her own production company Lunar Pictures last year and says: “All of my projects focus on stories and subjects who are working class, queer, Bipoc [Black, Indigenous and people of colour], or living with disabilities or neurodivergence.”



These projects include queer road-trip comedy drama Mama, directed by Laura Jayne Tunbridge (a screenwriter and fellow NFTS graduate who also directed 2021 award winning short Dragged Up, produced by Danielle); Edem Wornoo’s sci-fi Nova, about a young Black man drifting from his council flat towards death; and graduate Nosa Eke’s King Of The Court, a body horror period piece Danielle bills as “exploring gender and sexuality through the Black female queer lens.

 

Nathalie Pitters – Cinematographer

Nathalie is a gifted cinematographer whose visual storytelling prowess has garnered critical acclaim. Having graduated from the NFTS Cinematography MA in 2020, she won the Silver Tadpole in the Student Etudes Competition at 2020’s Camerimage International Film Festival for her graduation film Stratum Deep, set in a 1980s coal-mining community. She has gone on to shoot a number of music videos and commercials and is gearing up to shoot Queenie, a TV adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’ novel, for Disney’s Onyx Collective, Channel 4 and Lionsgate. “Queenie is allowing me to explore inner character and struggle, which is what I want to be able to do more of,” says Nathalie, who believes her own complicated upbringing has helped to shape her work — her heritage is Congolese, Italian and Greek, and she was raised on a London council estate by a single mum. “My whole life I’ve had to be like a chameleon, but it means I’m very observant and particularly sensitive to characters’ journeys. I try to be bold with my approach to shots. I would love to get [any] job where I didn’t have to play it safe, because that’s where I excel.”

 

Adeyemi Michael - Writer/Director

Having graduated from the NFTS Directing Documentary MA over a decade ago, Adeyemi, a Nigeria-born, London-based filmmaker has garnered acclaim for his documentary work, including his first short Sodiq in 2013, Panorama episode Murder On The Streets, and 2018 fantasy documentary Entitled. He is driven by a desire to explore a new landscape that blends fiction and documentary, while guided by his “North Star — to humanise and bring value to African life, to Black life, to my life, in a very specific way.”



He currently is in the thick of honing his feature debut as a writer/director with supernatural fantasy film Ibeji and has also been throwing himself into other high-profile projects. First, he shot second unit on Neil Gaiman’s Prime Video series Anansi Boys, working with the likes of Delroy Lindo and Whoopi Goldberg on an LED volume virtual-production wall in Edinburgh. “It was the first time I’d been on a production of a scale like that,” he says. Then he directed two episodes of BBC/Netflix show Champion, about the Black music scene in south London. Beyond Ibeji, Michael plans to continue applying his own distinct cultural texture to genre films with a supernatural sci-fi script, which he intends to be his second feature.

 

Sandhya Suri - Writer/Director

Hailing from Darlington in northeast England, British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya’s first filmmaking venture was buying a camera to document her time teaching in Japan; before enrolling on the Directing Documentary MA here at the National Film and Television School. “My only interest was to travel, to access worlds I have no right to enter otherwise — but with a camera to open doors, be curious,” she says. Among her international adventures are a year in India and running the film unit at charity Oxfam, where she covered disasters and development work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti among others. Her first filmmaking output was 2005 documentary I For India, about her father’s early life in England, which he recorded and sent back to India. It played Sundance in 2006, creating the connections that brought Suri back to the institute almost a decade later. Her upcoming feature, Santosh, will shoot later in 2023, a process which Sandhya describes as “one of the best experiences of my life”.

 

Congratulations to Nathan Danielle, Nathalie, Adeyemi and Sandhya on their achievements and we can’t wait to see what they create next!

To follow in the footsteps of NFTS alumni, please visit nfts.co.uk/courses and start your application today. To read the Screen Stars of Tomorrow profiles in more detail, visit screendaily.com.