Charlotte Wells: four years after Aftersun, closer to Chantal Akerman than to Hollywood

Charlotte Wells

Photo: F. E. Willard & M. A. R. Livermore / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 13, 1987 Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Aftersun
Awards	3 BAFTA · Directors Guild of America · British Independent Film Awards Best Director · British Independent Film Awards Best Film

The most celebrated British directing debut of this decade opened with footage that looked like a home video found in a drawer — shaky, sun-bleached, unbearably private. Four years on, the filmmaker behind it is not navigating a studio development slate. She is in Albany, New York, visiting a drum teacher whose former students once anchored Luscious Jackson, watching her recall a life in a city that no longer belongs to the people who built it.

Charlotte Wells does not move the way the industry expected her to. The BAFTA, the Directors Guild award, the Oscar nomination that circled Paul Mescal‘s performance in her film — all of it created a particular kind of pressure, the kind that tends to produce a follow-up designed to confirm the debut’s intelligence at a higher budget. She has chosen, so far, to make short films instead.

She grew up in Edinburgh’s Morningside neighborhood, attended George Heriot’s School, and moved south and then east: Classics at King’s College London, a postgraduate degree at Oxford, then New York City in her mid-twenties for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied producing and graduated with a dual MFA and MBA. She came to New York to produce. She ended up writing and directing, not because anyone told her to, but because the work she was drawn to required it. Somewhere in the background of all these transitions was the fact of her father’s death when she was sixteen — a loss she would spend the next two decades approaching obliquely.

Her short films staked out the territory early. Tuesday, from 2015, opened with the death of a father. Laps, a year later, depicted assault and urban isolation with the compression of a filmmaker who already understood that silence costs less than explanation — it won a Special Jury Prize for Editing at Sundance and Special Jury Recognition at SXSW. Blue Christmas, in 2017, turned to family dysfunction at the year’s most formally encoded moment. Across all three, a sensibility was becoming visible: interested in what is not shown, in what moves in the frame while the central character is looking away.

Aftersun took eight years. Wells first began pulling it together while going through old photographs of summer holidays she had taken with her father — trips to a Turkish coast resort, the particular quality of light at that latitude. What emerged was not autobiography in any documentary sense but something harder to categorize: a film in which a young Scottish woman, Sophie, watches footage of a vacation she took with her father when she was eleven, and finds in those images a grief that would have been impossible to assemble at the time. Paul Mescal played the father, Calum, approaching his thirty-first birthday in 1999 with a weight the film declines to name. Frankie Corio played young Sophie with the precision of a child who understands more than she is permitted to show. The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and reached audiences in the United States through A24.

The critical response was intense and immediate, but its terms were sometimes narrower than the film itself. Writers reached for ‘devastating’ and ‘deeply personal’ — both accurate, both slightly beside the point. What Aftersun actually does is more discomfiting: it refuses to deliver the scene that would allow a viewer to understand what happened to Calum. His depression, his precariousness, the film’s implication that he may not have survived much longer — all of it remains in the register of suspicion rather than confirmation. A viewer who wants the film to resolve its tragedy must sit with the possibility that it will not. This made it one of the most formally interesting debuts in British cinema in years, and it also made it harder to market, which A24 managed anyway.

Mescal received Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for Best Actor. Wells won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer and the Directors Guild of America’s award for first-time feature direction. The film accumulated more than a hundred nominations and thirty-three awards across the circuit. The New York Times placed it at 78th on its 2025 ranking of the best films of the twenty-first century.

At the BAFTAs, Wells used her acceptance speech to speak publicly about her own identity in a room that had not always made space for it. The film she had made, and the filmmaker she had made it as, were not two separate things.

The four years since have not produced a second feature. They have produced a music video for the musician Romy, a new short at the 2026 New York Film Festival, and a public statement of creative intent. That film, New York Never Let Me Down, runs fourteen minutes and visits Paula Spiro, a drum teacher in Albany whose former students have included Kate Schellenbach of Luscious Jackson, and who is among the queer elders being displaced from the city they helped shape. Wells has described her next project as one informed by Chantal Akerman’s News from Home — shot quickly, with whatever camera is nearby, closer to instinct than to production design. A Blondie biopic, with Debbie Harry’s endorsement and Florence Pugh circling the lead, exists on a different timeline. Whether those two timelines ever meet, and on whose terms, is the question the next few years will settle.

Tags: Paul Mescal, Aftersun, Charlotte Wells, Scottish cinema, Frankie Corio, Laps

Related People

Related People

Discussion