Angad Aulakh’s short films look bigger than their budgets, and that is the plan

Angad Aulakh

Occupation	Film director, screenwriter and producer

An astronaut lies on the floor of a ruined space station, screaming, certain he will never get home. Angad Aulakh says that single image is where AURORA started, and the short he built around it runs about a quarter of an hour on an independent budget while looking like the first act of something far more expensive. The gap is the method. Aulakh and his producing partner, the actor Guy Kent, now want the short to stop being a short: they are developing it as a television anthology, with no distributor yet attached.

The ambition fits a body of work that keeps stranding its protagonists far from anywhere they know. His first feature set an American photographer adrift in rural Iceland; his newest strands Kent’s Commander Freddie Ballard at the far edge of space. In between came two shorts set much closer to the living room, a Cold War nightmare and a horror story about grief, and those small films are what kept his name in circulation for most of a decade.

Aulakh is an Indian-American writer, director and producer, and little of his early life is on the public record. His career is easier to trace through Kent, a friend of nearly fifteen years by his own count. The two run Last Carnival, a banner they share with the attorney Ashley M. Kent. Before their first feature, Kent has written, they developed three separate projects in about nine months, each one closer to what investors needed to see, and that patience raised private equity in the United States before any foreign partner came in.

Iceland came next, partly for the isolation the script needed and partly for the co-production incentives. Aulakh, who wrote and directed, joined Davíd Óskar Ólafsson and Árni Filippusson, the producers of Ragnar Bragason’s Metalhead and of Either Way, the film David Gordon Green remade as Prince Avalanche. Shot around Þingvellir and in a Reykjavík studio with a largely Icelandic crew, Autumn Lights cast Kent as a photographer who finds a body on a remote shoreline and is pulled into the marriage of an Italian woman, played by Marta Gastini, and her Icelandic husband, played by Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson. Freestyle released it in North American theaters and on demand on the same day, October 21, 2016, and it reached Northern European cinemas two weeks later.

The reception is the part his press materials tend to leave out. Some critics went with the mood: the Village Voice heard “a blast of quiet chilly melancholy,” and Michael Calleri wrote in the Niagara Gazette that “Aulakh succeeds.” Others were blunt. Slant Magazine credited him with dodging the postcard Iceland of tourism videos, then called the film moralistic and “unambiguously misogynist” in how it judged its heroine’s desires. Roger Moore of Movie Nation liked the lonely sense of place and found every performance except Gastini’s as lifeless as a painting. In Italy, the Riviera International Film Festival nominated it for best picture and Aulakh for best director. Nominations, not prizes, and the last time he would compete at feature length.

No second feature followed. Aulakh went instead through Ryan Murphy’s HALF Initiative, the program built to open directing jobs to women and filmmakers from under-represented backgrounds, and he worked on the second-season premiere of 9-1-1, an episode loaded with practical and digital effects. He told MCM that watching a production that size from beginning to end taught him how much preparation, communication and collaboration matter once the ambition turns technical. Everything he has made since reads like a test of that lesson.

The Atomic Dream, released in 2022, is ten minutes long and set in the days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Kent plays Frank, son-in-law to a woman, played by Marchand Storch, who sits before the television news convinced that nuclear war is coming, with a teddy bear named Rodney for company. Charlie Wuppermann, the Emmy-winning cinematographer of Kedi, shot it, and a short theatrical run through Filmocracy and iGems made it eligible for Oscar consideration. Resurrektor followed a year later, co-written with Taylor Sardoni: Taylor Cooper plays a young woman who finds a book that might bring her dead sister back. Chris Salce of Film Threat put it at the top of his list of 2023 shorts. By the production’s own count, the two films collected 33 festival awards and 49 nominations between them.

AURORA pushes the visual bet as far as it has gone. It is shot in black and white, on a soundstage built around an existing set, with visual effects by Stuart Lippincott, Ian Mills Miller and Adam Spizak and, according to Film Carnage, no AI at all. “I don’t believe limited resources should mean limited possibilities,” Aulakh told MCM. The same Film Carnage review that admired the scale found the story thinner than the pictures and the ending reaching higher than it could hold. It is a fair reading of a director whose films start from an image and whose critics, from Iceland onward, have tended to praise the image first. Aulakh does not apologise for the open ending. He did not want to explain the presence that reaches Freddie, he told NetflixJunkie, or “reduce it to a set of rules.”

The festival year has been generous. AURORA had its world premiere at HollyShorts in Los Angeles in August 2026, then joined the 27th Malibu Film Festival, which screens at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills. At FilmQuest in Provo, Utah, which runs until October 31, it is nominated for best sci-fi short and best visual effects, and the Festival of Fantastic Films in the UK has nominated it for its Delta Award. The Anomaly Film Festival in Rochester and the Toronto Arthouse Film Festival have also programmed it. Jennalyn Ponraj, Robert Diago DoQui and Ethan Daniel Corbett complete the cast.

What comes next is television. Aulakh told MCM that a series would follow how people from different cultures, backgrounds and belief systems respond to the forces the short sets loose; Kent calls Freddie’s story “just one piece of a bigger world.” There is also a feature-length Resurrektor script, written with Sardoni, that Last Carnival has said it intends to produce. Ten years after Autumn Lights, Aulakh’s next long-form work depends on a buyer accepting a fifteen-minute film as proof that the world he built will hold.

Tags: Angad Aulakh, Aurora (short film), Guy Kent, Autumn Lights, Resurrektor, The Atomic Dream