Name: Aurora
Director: Angad Aulakh
Genre: Science fiction, Drama, Short film
Cast: Guy Kent, Jennalyn Ponraj, Robert Diago DoQui, Ethan Daniel Corbett

Most festival shorts are calling cards. The makers of AURORA are unusually frank about what theirs is for. Director Angad Aulakh and actor-producer Guy Kent are developing the black-and-white space drama as a television anthology series, and in answers to questions from MCM, Kent describes the short as a proof of concept and “the beginning of something larger.”

The film strands Kent’s Commander Freddie Ballard at the far edge of space after a catastrophic accident, then turns a survival story into one about grief. Aulakh says it began with a single image: “an astronaut lying on the floor of a desolate space station, screaming in torment, knowing that he would never make it home.” He wanted to hold both the beauty of space and its “potential for cruelty”, while leaving open the possibility that the universe “might also contain something capable of tremendous kindness and compassion.”

AURORA looks far bigger than a short usually can, and it is nominated for Best Visual Effects at FilmQuest. Aulakh credits planning: deciding what could be achieved in camera and what visual effects would build on top. Digital artist Stuart Lippincott, whose work shaped how Aulakh pictured space while writing, came aboard for those sequences, and Ian Mills Miller gave the station its scale and brought the film’s Entity to life. “I don’t believe limited resources should mean limited possibilities,” Aulakh says. Kent, as producer, names the practical trick: a soundstage with an existing set to build on, and money spent only where it adds real value. “If the world didn’t hold up, nothing emotional in the story would land.”

An astronaut silhouetted against the lattice of a space station in AURORA — Image: Last Carnival LLC

Kent spends part of the film behind a helmet visor, and his approach to the solitude is restraint. “I don’t think isolation is necessarily something you show. It’s something you sit in,” he says. Freddie first works out what has happened to him, then is gradually confronted with “something much more personal and existential.”

Guy Kent as Commander Freddie Ballard in a black-and-white close-up from AURORA — Image: Last Carnival LLC

AURORA is the pair’s third film together, after The Atomic Dream and Resurrektor, and the partnership rests on a friendship of nearly fifteen years. Asked where they still disagree, both give the same answer: not much. Aulakh, Kent says, “knows what his frame needs to communicate.”

The series plan has a television pedigree behind it. Aulakh is an alum of Ryan Murphy‘s HALF Initiative and worked on the second-season premiere of 9-1-1 — an effects-heavy episode that, he says, showed him how much preparation, communication and collaboration matter on technically ambitious work. AURORA is being developed for television rather than as a feature, with room to explore how people from different cultures, backgrounds and belief systems might respond to the forces the short introduces.

No distribution deal has been announced; the filmmakers say they are exploring their options while the festival run continues. AURORA is part of the 27th Malibu Film Festival at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills, and it competes for Best Sci-Fi Short and Best Visual Effects at FilmQuest in Provo, Utah, which runs until 31 October.

The strategy is clear: use the festivals to prove the world can hold, then sell the anthology. Freddie’s story, as Kent puts it, “is just one piece of a bigger world.”

Tags: Ryan Murphy, Angad Aulakh, Aurora (short film), FilmQuest, Guy Kent, Last Carnival, Malibu Film Festival, science fiction short films