Novella Success Stories

One of the things that sets Novella apart from other film festivals is our high value cash prizes. We offer these because our main goal is to be a springboard for our winning filmmakers. We believe that their winnings should allow them to take the next step in their careers and continue to do what they love: make more films.

After last year’s festival, we awarded £10,000 worth of cash prizes to our 10 winning films. We caught up with a few of the filmmakers to see what that prize money had allowed them to do in the past year.

“The Novella prize has been immensely helpful. It gave me the funds to kickstart my next film, providing the budget to rent more premium camera kit, cover travel expenses and submit to several festivals and initiatives. I’m thrilled with the quality of the final film and with the opportunity to present my work to high-end film festivals, and without the Novella prize that would not have been possible.“

– Thomas Winward, director of ‘The Birdwatchers’, NFF24 Environmental Narrative winner

“Novella was our first nomination and win our festival run for Francie and was such a massive boost. We used the Novella winnings to support the production of a new short film called Blanket Fort. The money helped to cover our location costs and studio hire, and we would have struggled to make the film without it – so we are extremely grateful!”

– Zoe Ellender, director of ‘Francie’, NFF24 Female Narrative winner

“I’m working towards making a feature film, which will be a bilingual/Welsh language fantasty film set in a Brythonic otherworld, and will tackle themes of environmentalism and humanity. I’m hoping to incorporate archive footage material and shoot the film on 16mm.
The winnings from our short have helped fund a significant part of the project and will be divided across the budget – so thank you!”

– Luke Russell, director of ‘Tape 39: The Archive of Simon Waters’, NFF24 Experimental winner

Other people told us that the cash prize allowed them to retroactively pay their crew a more reasonable wage, which is super important in the world of low budget shorts and music videos.

It is so fantastic to hear from our previous winners and to see what a real difference the cash prizes have made and continue to make. Huge credit to these filmmakers for using their brilliant short films to fund the next step in their journey, we’re over the moon to have played a part in it.

Our raison d’être is to empower filmmakers who are telling new stories, and to amplify previously unheard voices in the film industry so that they can make it their own – our tangible prizes allow them to do just that.