Project Detail

Out of the Peat

Name: Out of the Peat
Director: Tabitha Carless-Frost, Theo Rollason
Genre: Experimental, LGBTQIA+, Horror, Drama, Fantasy
Released: 2025
Duration: 12 min

Isabel MacCarthy

Synopsis

Flesh as film, and film as flesh... An amateur archaeologist arrives on a desolate peatland in Lancashire, their mind filled with the strange power that peat-bog waters hold to preserve organic matter. They have come to excavate the peatland. They have come to exhume a body. But, in digging into the peat - and into the past - they unearth much more than mere relics. The peat holds forgotten histories, uneasy truths, and vast stores of climate-change-accelerating carbon. Reflecting the attempt to document and preserve this landscape via the moving image, the film becomes both a lament and a call to action for local peat-bog restoration and protection. A queer eco-horror which reflects on what it means to bury, to archive, to capture, to unearth. Shot in collaboration with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, the film becomes both a lament and call to action for local peat-bog conservation.
Official Selection London Short Film Festival 2025

Details

Year: 2025
Type of project: Shorts
Running time: 12 min
Format: 16mm
Director: Tabitha Carless-Frost, Theo Rollason
Producer: Tate Turnbull
Executive Producer: Nicole Davis
Editor: Anthony Ing
Screenwriter: Tabitha Carless-Frost
Director of Photography: Morgan K. Spencer
Composer: Richard Skelton
Principal cast: Roo Gehring

Genre

Experimental LGBTQIA+ Horror Drama Fantasy Sci-Fi

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

Supported by BFI NETWORK

Acetate Pictures Ltd

Tate Turnbull

tate@acetatepictures.com

Page updates

This page was last updated on 19th January 2026. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

Suggest amendments

Soft-spoken transmasc driver, Toni, is used to dealing with an array of strange customers in their day-to-day work transporting locals and tourists through the economically divided City of Cape Town in their late father’s vintage Daimler. But when Claudia, a German digital nomad with blonde dreadlocks, offloads a traumatic story on a short ride across town, Toni’s car becomes dangerously possessed with Claudia’s invisible trauma demon. Inside Out Film Festival 2026 Wicked Queer: Boston's LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2026

Horror

A disturbed looking man stares straight into the camera

Welcome

Director: Maryam Hamidi

Year: 2026

A famous Black actor accepts a role in a lucrative government film, but when he learns he’s starring in a welcome video for a British Internment camp, he is confronted by the devastating cost of his political indifference.

Black Drama Human Rights Scottish Thriller

A nun staring off screen at a commotion.

The Country

Director: Ella Grace Kennedy