[Above: with my fiancé Edward Harvey on one of our local country walks, during the Christmas period.]
It’s at this time every year where I usually sit down and write a blog post which looks back at the twelve months just gone; what went well, what I learned, and what I hope for the near future. And although, yes, I am writing just such a blog post right now, I will admit that I felt a bit hesitant in doing so. And I’m not currently certain that I’ll actually post it. I wasn’t even sure if 2025 deserved preservation in written form.
For all intents and purposes, it was not a very good year. I faced multiple setbacks, both in my personal life as well as professionally, and the entire routine and lifestyle I’d established for myself over the past few years was completely flipped on its head, leading to higher stress levels than I’ve faced in a very long time - all of which has taken a toll on me physically. I haven’t wanted to admit any of this to myself, let alone share my thoughts on a public forum such as this.
However, on Christmas day, I was given a much-needed sense of perspective. Some members of my beloved family are Ukrainian, and when we were sat around the dinner table, we took a moment to remember those affected by or living through ongoing conflict. It was the mental kick up the backside I needed to remember how lucky I am, how fleeting life is sometimes, and how much worse things could be. I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself, move on from this year, and cease acting like a victim of my own situation.
One option would be to act like 2025 never happened. And if it hadn’t happened, if I could take myself back to the person I was in 2024, would I still feel good about my life? Absolutely. In terms of my career, I had been reaching close to the peak of my success to date. All that I have achieved previously has still happened, and 2025 was just one year in a lifetime of building a ladder for myself - so, if I simply swept last year out of my mind like dust under a rug, I could move forwards with some hard-earned confidence.
But life experience is an important thing. Dark times ground us, helping to show us who we really are, and enabling us to appreciate the little (but solid) bits of everyday joy that underly the bigger picture. So, rather than ignoring what I’ve been through, I have instead decided to find a healthier way to process it; I am planning on writing a new feature script, which is a work of fiction, and leaning into the psychological, magical-realist approach I’ve developed over the years, but very much inspired by the recent events that have re-shaped my life. That script will have a working title of The Scent, and I look forward to sharing more information when I can start work on it and have more concrete details. Let that project be a positive and creative way for me to use the knowledge I’ve gained, expelling a few demons in the process, rather than just ignoring the past.
And the truth of the matter is that it’s also incredibly useful when people share their low points as well as their highs, and when I’ve spoken to other people recently – fellow creatives as well as small business owners – it seems as though 2025 was a universally bad year for many. And when you realise that others are in a similar boat, that it’s not just you, it stops you from feeling like such a failure. So, if me opening up can help other people, in the way that speaking to my peers has helped me, then that’s definitely worth doing. So here I am, writing this blog post after all.
[By the way, if any of you are thinking that it is right for you to leave the film industry, which is totally fair as the industry sucks as much as it can be awesome, I recommend reading this honest and insightful article from Merryn Rae Peachey, who made just such a decision in 2025 and bravely shared her thoughts.]
I don’t feel it’s right to share all the bad stuff from my life in this blog post. And I don’t want to bore you all with the nitty gritty details, or moan any more than I already have done. Instead, there were four key highlights in 2025 which I do want to acknowledge, alongside a few other achievements and moments that I genuinely feel grateful for, so let’s break those down…
[Above: with some of the cast & crew of Lacuna at a private screening in none other than Vue Leicester Square!]
Of course, my biggest accomplishment this year was finishing my latest short film Lacuna, which was funded by Amazon Prime Video and the National Film and Television School, and made as part of their Director’s Workshop. The film features the incredible Sadie Soverall (who was named as a Screen Daily Star of Tomorrow in 2025), and the majority of the super-talented crew were NFTS students, so the final stages of post-production we completed at the start of last year were a real privilege for me, as I described in my Summer Update blog post, even if all the trips back and forth to London and Beaconsfield felt like a bit of a whirlwind at the time!
We ended the project with a bang by sharing the film at a private screening last June, at none other than Vue Cinema in Leicester Square, which is an experience I’ve dreamed of for a long time now, and it was definitely a highlight of 2025. The film's brilliant producer Olivia Song is currently submitting it to festivals, and so I can’t wait to share it with more audiences this year. I have everything tightly crossed.
My previous short film, A Different Place, also continued to do me proud. The film had one final festival screening, and a brief cinema run at Derby QUAD last March, followed by an online premiere with a fantastic streaming platform called LesFlicks. The producers (Katie Smith and Charlie Clarke) and I then decided to release the film on Vimeo and YouTube… where it has had over 200,000 views already! I still can’t believe that stat, as releasing films online can sometimes feel like sending it out to die, but I am so grateful and glad to see that people are responding well to the film.
In addition, CenterFrame and Prano Bailey-Bond (a director I truly respect) gave the film the most incredible shout-out when they chose it for their ‘Selects’ competition. As well as sharing this complimentary video review, Prano was publicly quoted as describing A Different Place as “confident, sensitive filmmaking from a director who clearly knows what they want to say.” Gosh, was I excited and proud to read that!!
And although A Different Place has earned its rest, after years of incredible success at festivals, the producers and I do still have a couple of plans for it. There’s another cinema screening coming up soon (details will be posted on Triskelle Pictures’ social media platforms in the coming weeks), and we’ll be releasing the Audio Descriptive version of the film on YouTube too, so that it can be enjoyed by as many people as possible.
Prano Bailey-Bond wasn’t the only director I admire who shared some kind words about me in 2025. By complete coincidence, when Owen Tooth and Rebekah Fortune were interviewed (separately) about their work by BFI NETWORK Film Hub Midlands, they both named me as being their favourite Midlands filmmaker! First, in his interview, Owen said that I have “an intimate and beautiful eye for story, and she’s going from strength to strength… Sophie’s right on the edge of becoming a success story all of us can be proud of.” Then Rebekah kindly said that I’m “carving out a voice that is both playful and precise… it’s only a matter of time before she explodes onto a much larger stage.” In a year where I’ve been followed around by a self-doubt demon, at times even questioning my life choices, these votes of confidence from such incredible filmmakers, whose careers seem so advanced ahead of my own, truly gave me a boost. I cannot thank them enough, and I have loved seeing them achieve great things in recent years.
[Above: with the cast & crew of Ren: The Girl With The Mark at MCM Comic Con in London.]
The series of Ren: The Girl With The Mark I worked on also received a lot of praise last year, and I was delighted to share two directing nominations with my fellow series 2 directors (one from Rio Webfest, one from The Hollywood Series Awards). I unfortunately had to turn down the opportunity to direct an episode of Ren series 3, but I was still involved in another way, as my lovely frequent collaborator Jo Lewis brought me on board to edit the director’s cut of her episode, which was a lot of fun to work on.
Ren also brought about my second highlight of the year, when myself and other members of the team were invited guests at MCM Comic Con in London, which is the biggest comic con in the country! I was asked to speak on a panel, which was amazing, and second only to reuniting with the Ren cast for the first time since I directed them back in 2023. I had worried that I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the experience, because my head was swimming with the problems I was juggling back home and I honestly had no sleep the night before. But as one particularly lovely member of the cast pointed out to me, “whatever else is happening in life, what matters is that we still get to have good moments like this.” He was totally right, and I was ultimately able to cherish the day.
There were other achievements in 2025. I was longlisted for Primetime Network’s Re:Present programme, and in the Autumn I was considered to direct an episode of an established broadcast television series for the first time! Obviously I won’t name the series here, but it meant the world to me that my name even ‘came up in the room’ and I’ve now reached the point where my work is being recognised in such a way. I’d still love to work in TV more, either directing or doing second unit, so I will be continuing to push that side of my career in 2026.
I also enjoyed sharing my knowledge and giving back to the next generation of filmmakers over the past twelve months, through teaching at BFI Film Academy, mentoring early-stage directors via BFI NETWORK, and speaking on a panel at Beeston Film Festival back in April.
[Above: The Directors UK screening of Frankenstein. Huge thanks to Nadine O'Mahony for quickly snapping the third photo of me meeting Guillermo del Toro!]
And 2025 was another year where I got to meet legends and heroes in person. Through my Cinesisters membership, I attended a Women’s Day symposium where I was able to ask questions to Imelda Staunton (more details about that in my last Summer Update blog post), as well as getting some fantastic advice from Babyteeth director Shannon Murphy AND the groundbreaking Sally Potter through the group’s regular Zoom meetings. Then, in October, thanks to Directors UK, I was able to see Frankenstein ahead of general release, followed by a Q&A with Guillermo del Toro AND Alfonso Cuarón… and after the screening, I got the opportunity to speak to Guillermo directly! I only had about five seconds with him, because obviously he’s a busy guy and there were lots of other people understandably clamouring to talk to him, but I shook his hand and thanked him for the years of inspiration he’s given me, as well as everything he’s done for other filmmakers. Brief as this interaction was, it is of course another one of my highlights from last year. Anyone who knows me knows that Guillermo is one of my top, all-time heroes, and so the interaction made me rather nervous, but last time I attended one of his screenings (for Pinocchio in 2022), I didn’t even feel brave enough to go up to him – so my confidence has definitely grown since then.
In terms of my branded content and client-facing work, which I usually talk about at this point in an end-of-year blog post, things there weren’t quite as easy as in previous years. For those of you who don’t know, in addition to directing, I founded and run a production company called Triskelle Pictures, as a platform through which I can receive film funding and produce narrative work for myself and other directors; in order to pay for the company’s outgoing annual bills, it also produces branded content for clients, mostly small and arts-related businesses, which is a system that has worked very well for a number of years (and the work has made me happier than any job I’ve ever done). However, the current financial crisis has been catastrophic for many of my regular clients, which of course impacted the amount of video work that they were able to commission. Things got progressively worse until I was faced with a difficult choice: close down Triskelle Pictures, or take myself off the payroll and seek alternative ways to pay the bills. I chose the latter, essentially doing any Triskelle client work on a fully unpaid, voluntary basis on top of my other work so that the business could still afford to break even. Which has meant working at least six days a week for the majority of this year, and some months I even worked seven days a week. It was exhausting, but it was the only way to save the business I’d worked so hard to build.
I could still do with bringing in a bit more client work this year, but overall, because of the hours of graft I’ve put in, it’s looking like the company will live to fight another day, thank goodness, and I’m able to start easing off my workload ever-so-slightly – freeing up time which I intend on giving to the narrative side of my career a bit more in 2026, pursuing my aforementioned TV work but hopefully also finishing another draft of my two live feature film scripts, Night Owls & Early Birds and The Barn.
And don’t get me wrong, I am of course mega grateful for the client work I have done this year. Everyone who booked me was so lovely to work with (a million ‘thank you’s to them!), and there were some projects that I was particularly proud of – such as the Love Belper commercial that we made last August (above), because the local community really got involved, and I was able to help promote the town that made me (it’s also where some of my earliest films were shot, back in the day). I also ended up shooting that film myself, which was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I genuinely enjoyed the challenge. Another job that meant a lot to me was an NHS film I edited for an ace video agency called Dynomite Productions, where we shared the stories of some incredibly brave and brilliant young people. One of my regular camera operators, the DOP Luke J. Collins, even got to work on that project for a couple of days, so that was great!
As for my personal life in 2025, that was also challenging, because the year brought financial difficulties alongside multiple illnesses and hospital visits across different sides of my family. If I can ask for one thing in 2026, it will be to not see anyone I love struggling! But through good times and bad, I had my fiancé Edward Harvey at my side, and he even renewed his commitment to me by buying me the most beautiful elfin engagement ring last Autumn, a little while after I’d initially proposed to him and given him his ring. I’ve loved taking steps towards planning our wedding again, even if we are doing so tentatively while we’re still navigating the upheavals of the last 12 months.
[Above left: me and Edward at Cromford Comic Con last August. Above right: both our engagement rings. Receiving my ring from him in the Autumn was, of course, my fourth highlight of 2025.]
So, that was my year, the good and the bad (with broad strokes and vague details, so some bits can still be kept private). Interestingly enough, for saying I felt like I’d achieved very little in 2025, this still ended up being a long blog post – so maybe that says something?
My main goal this time last year, at the start of 2025, was to be sensible and get a bit more financially stable. It wasn’t easy, but I achieved that – as much as anyone working in a creative industry can do! This year, I want to find more balance in my life, so somehow allocating more time to work on narrative projects, but also remembering to look after myself better (which has been pretty much impossible in the months where I worked seven days a week. I didn’t even garden as much as I usually do). As someone pointed out to me recently, it’s very easy to confuse fatigue with failure, so self-care is important if I want to be able to do my best work possible.
My other 2026 resolution is to stop waiting for things to happen. This sounds like a strange thing to say when I grafted so hard last year, but it’s a bad habit I fell into without realising it at the time. Every day in 2025, I kept my email tab open on my desktop, keeping an eye on it, wishing and hoping for good news that just never came – which was, frankly, a little pathetic, and that behaviour ended with the new year. Just because I’ve been working at my career for years now, doesn’t mean I can expect opportunities to come my way. Life doesn’t work like that.
Too many filmmakers ‘wait for permission’ to pursue their dreams, whereas I used to be good at generating narrative film work for myself and others in the local area. I need to go back to that somehow, rather than just applying for the same limited funding pots and placement schemes as everyone else. Oddly enough, I think the first step to that will be putting more effort into my social media channels again; in the past, I was able to utilise the community aspect of places like Twitter to generate excitement and to crowdfund my work. I wonder if it's time to pursue that method again, perhaps in some new form? I’ll give it some thought and hopefully share some results this time next year.
What else am I looking forward to in 2026 (aside from bringing Lacuna to festivals)? I’m going to work on getting an agent again (I didn’t secure one in 2025, but I came a lot closer on two occasions, so I’m going to make it third time lucky!); I’ve been selected as a judge for the 2026 Midlands Movies Awards, and I’ve enjoyed watching everyone’s submissions in my rare pockets of time over breakfast or in lunch breaks; and some of the projects myself and Jo Lewis have been developing for a while might be moving forwards soon, so watch this space.
So finally, in closing: what have I learned through all this? Although 2025 was a year of change for me, that doesn’t mean things can’t change again; maybe I can’t go back to who I was in 2024, but maybe the 2026 version of myself will surpass her – providing I actively work to improve her. After a year where it feels like nothing has goes to plan, and the path you’ve carved out for yourself appears to be sinking into the ground, the time has come to start mapping out a new one – something similar, and beginning in parallel to the old path, so you can still see where you’ve been and what you’ve gained from the journey, but finding a different way to reach the ultimate goal. Just don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers along the route. Breathe in deep.
*
2025: The Year In Stats
Countries visited: Once again, I didn't leave England this year! Work and film festival related travel really dropped in 2025, particularly in the second half, and I didn't even take a holiday.
House moves: None.
Weddings attended: Two - my cousin's, and an old friend's. Lovely stuff.
Film Festivals attended: Only one, Beeston Film Festival, because I gave a talk there. Honestly 2025 might have been my worst festival year, although A Different Place screened at one and Ren: The Girl With The Mark had a few selections too.
Gigs attended: ...none! Whoops. I didn't even stop to see any of the great acts perform when I was working at Found Festival last August. I absolutely must do better in 2026.
