Louisa Connolly-Burnham’s ‘KULT’ of darkly…

From the moment I saw two sapphic Mormon wives hack up an eggplant for dinner, I knew Louisa Connolly-Burnham was going to chart a new course for women in film. From intimacy coordinators with sex addictions to unflinching studies of consent, arousal non-concordance and female bodily autonomy, Connolly-Burnham rewrites the short film formula in a raw, finger-suckingly sensual challenge to what stories can be told about (and by) women. 

Debuting on the small screen in CBBC’s fantasy teen drama series Wolfblood in 2012, Connolly-Burnham’s acting affair extends over the better part of 20 years – a first love set to defy what the bounds of a director should be. In The Call Centre, the filmmaker stars as Paige, a lonely young woman squandering her days setting up life insurance policies. Speaking about balancing the director-actor scale’s equilibrium by means of a mini, cordless monitor, Connolly-Burnham is able to stand on her mark as an actress with her cast and use the monitor to light and frame the scene with the DoP. It’s an atypical, jack-of-all-trades approach that regularly leaves the filmmaker unable to review takes as they run, oftentimes placing trust in the crew to sacrifice a playback for more coverage. Here, her display of complete creative control from page to direction and performance results in a heat so visceral that we feel it inside our own skin. 

As The Call Centre descends somewhere darker in Paige’s pursuit of a sexual relationship with an older customer, it is undoubtedly the filmmaker’s own distinct fingerprint on each part of the process that packs the film’s punch. While Paige suckles on the finger in her mouth, the camera refuses to rip away from its shrewd, intrusive observance of her sexuality. 

It’s a darker, messier exploration of femininity that Connolly-Burnham revisits in her most recent short, The Intimacy Coordinator. Led by the filmmaker alongside Code of Silence​’s Kieron Moore, the film centres on Kate, an intimacy coordinator with a sex addiction whose boundaries blur as she fails to keep her professional life separate from her private instincts. As a feverish montage of one-night stands is held up against the bleak stillness of Kate alone in her room, it is the polarity of her addiction and loneliness that makes her all the more real. More than simple saints or evil sinners, Connolly-Burnham recognises the importance of representing the imperfection and complexity of women on screen.

In Sister Wives, a short attaining Oscar, BIFA and BAFTA longlist status, the filmmaker draws on conversations surrounding women trapped within the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) – a radical polygamist sect formerly hailing from the Mormon Church. The film unfolds as a queer romance detailing the love affair between Kaidence (Connolly-Burnham) and Galilee (Mia McKenna Bruce), two sister wives married to the same man. 

Here, Connolly-Burnham plays with the brevity of the short form to experiment with story structure. Without the supplementary exposition and intricate world-building required for a feature, the filmmaker easily inundates her audience with life and values endemic to 19^th-century pilgrims. With phlegmatic women in pastel peasant dresses and an agricultural mise-en-scéne, we have our legs pulled in the direction of a narrative depicting an oppression of women long past. It is only by Galilee’s confession of her procurement of a contraband Nokia 3310 that we are shaken awake to understand that this is a far more modern cautionary tale. In its portrait of a still practising religious cult, the prestidigitation of the film’s true set-up fires a shot at sex equality disparities that remain at large. 

The film is also exploratory in its use of sound – barred from a score until the due climax of Kaidence and Galilee’s intimacy. In doing so, the function of music as an instrument of suspense is subverted, instead replaced with a monastic silence to create a stiff, watchful atmosphere fitting for women under the dominion of the FLDS. But this is not the first time Connolly-Burnham has weaponised a restraint of non-diegetic sound. 

In her refusal to score Louisa Sexton’s The Ceiling, the filmmaker tests the limits of the short film by constructing the audience as a third character. The film explores the often unspoken complexities of active consent in dating contexts, following Harriet as she wakes up next to Jamie the morning following a one-night stand. As Jamie initiates sex despite her protests, the absence of a soundtrack makes for an uncomfortably voyeuristic soundscape dictated by the beat of Harriet’s breath. It’s a bold choice that Connolly-Burnham doubles down on in her use of long, unbroken takes from a birds-eye perspective. Indeed, as powerless and part of the assault as Harriet herself, we become the ceiling. 

The film is a masterclass in the power of critical, potent topics when concentrated into the compact form of the short film. The time constraint backs the filmmaker into a corner where every decision must be defined by emotion, a challenge she rises to with new ways to muscle feeling into a scene. In its experimentation with an abstract, choking succession of close-ups, The Ceiling externalises onto the audience the dissociation that so often comes with arousal non-concordance – the disconnect between your bodily reaction to sexual stimuli and your desire for sex. We are placed so firmly in Harriet’s shoes that the shadow of the film looms over us long past the credits, having borne witness to an exploitation of the short form as an opportunity to make a marriage out of activism and film. 

We see this again in Fleeting. As a mirror to Lisa O’Connor’s own experience (who wrote and also stars in the film), it opens a much-needed window into the still incessant conversation surrounding female bodily autonomy and a woman’s right to choose. The film follows Saoirse, a young woman who has flown home to Ireland in 2018 to repeal the Eighth Amendment – the law criminalising abortion in most of all cases – as she confronts her father, who is fiercely pro-life. Forced to cut straight to Saoirse’s crunch point over a pint at the pub, the filmmaker is able to laser focus her portrayal of the generational differences between father and daughter. Living in a digital age that whittles away our attention spans with a gluttonous feed of short-form content, the filmmaker recognises the short form’s conciseness as a tool to rinse dry the emotion from her subject, and uses it to present palatable, bite-sized chunks of reformism that can start important discussions. 

And these are not simply values that Connolly-Burnham parades in front of the camera. On a mission to transform traditional industry spaces, the filmmaker launched KULTY: an inclusive community for women, non-binary and gender-queer filmmakers to share opportunities and work. Through community events, short film workshops, training opportunities and sets that typically comprise a 90% female crew, she is unlocking a door to an unsung directory of creatives and contributing to breaking down the historical gender gap in the film industry. Her prioritisation of projects unapologetically made about and by women carves a new path for more authentic, women-centric stories that not only shape social perspectives about women, but also defy what their role in film can be, both in front of and behind the camera.