Naomi Waring
Writer / Director
England / UK
Naomi Waring is a writer-director whose short Milk, executive produced by Sienna Miller and supported by The Uncertain Kingdom, will screen at BAFTA AND Oscar-qualifying festivals in 2025. Rooted in working-class communities, her work explores youth culture, care systems, masculinity, and the female perspective through a poetic social-realist lens. A London Film School graduate, she was selected for Béla Tarr’s directing workshop, supported by the Tiscino Film Commission and the Locarno Film Festival, with her film Ascend screening at Locarno. She has directed BBC-commissioned work (Ode) and (Privileged), and made award-winning shorts including Little Ones and the 11th. Her films have screened at Locarno, Galway, Aesthetica, Dublin, Cork, Manchester, Holyshorts, and Uppsala, winning a Shiny Award and Best International Short Film.
Project
Drifters
Sam, 40’s a London photographer with a looming deadline for an unfinished project, escapes to a bleak northern town, fleeing routine, motherhood, and herself. She roams garages, estates, and pool halls like a hungry ghost, until she finds Ryan—a drifting enthusiast, gentle yet restless. She captures him in moments of raw tenderness with his daughter and in flashes of violence, her lens blurring art, intimacy, and control. She invites him deeper into her work, photographing him in quiet domesticity, the images bending masculinity into something softer, their connection a grey area that continues to pull her deeper. At her exhibition in Arles, she’s eager to show Ryan another type of world, Ryan doesn’t come. His absence hangs in the room as strangers study his face. Sam waits, uncertain whether she’s lost a subject or something more.Back home, she finds her husband waiting, longing for intimacy she’s avoided for years. When he reaches for her hand, she lets him, realising she’s been hiding not from him, but from the risk of being truly seen.
