Nathan Hughes
Writer / Director
UK (Wales)
Nathan’s dramas and docs aim to affirm essential human values and empower people to resist toxic narratives that impede socio-ecological justice. His work ‘demonstrates a distinctive cinematic and/or artistic vision’ (Encounters Festival), and has been supported by RIFF Talent Lab, London Comedy Film Festival, and London Screenwriter’s Festival. He has mentored young screenwriters to develop media resources to combat ideological grooming and radicalisation, and produced site-specific theatre with fluid configurations of people, place and technology. He has exhibited speculative design fictions and evocative promos at international arts symposia (ISEA, US & China CHI, Zebra Poetry Film Festival, AHRC’s Research in Film Awards), and engaged diverse audiences through innovative collaborations with (BBC, NESTA,The National Trust.
Mourning Glory unpicks the uses and abuses of family, friendship, and porn as grief therapy; to reveal how we configure (and disfigure) identity in relation to place, and why you can take girls and boys out of Wales, but you can’t take Wales out of the girls and boys.
Project
Mourning Glory
MOURNING GLORY is a poignant comedy about the uses and abuses of amateur porn as grief therapy. Stuck in his bleak Welsh hometown after his mother’s death, emotionally constipated porn addict AL is at existential year zero. Brazen misfit MEG plans to escape this town by following her idol, Welsh porn star Gail Maze to a glitzy new life in L.A. She needs a hot scene to attract the adult industry, but her natural cum-face does not fit its toxic parody of sexuality. In his darkest hour, AL turns to feckless filmmaker MUFF, but he wants to make a film about his new-found birth mother’s story that as a foetus in her womb, he saved her from jumping off a cliff. MEG brokers a deal to play MUFF’s suicidal teen mum if he shoots her hot scene. When MUFF gaslights AL to be MEG’s co-star, three wounded people learn that making amateur porn (badly) is paradoxically therapeutic and compel each other to face their authentic selves.
