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Award-Winning Filmmaker Georgia May on Memory, Film Grain, and Emotional Storytelling
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There’s something quietly magnetic about the films of Georgia May. They don’t rush to explain themselves. Instead, they drift, linger, and ache in ways that feel deeply human. A shaky close-up. A half-finished sentence. Cigarette smoke curling through a frame like memory itself. Her films feel less like stories being told and more like moments being remembered in real time, tenderly imperfect and impossible to fully hold onto.
An award-winning screenwriter, filmmaker, poet, and author, Georgia May creates work that sits somewhere between documentary, diary, and emotional archaeology. Drawing inspiration from filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and the raw intimacy of observational cinema, her work leans into the psychological, the avant-garde, and the beautifully unresolved. There’s film grain, restlessness, counterculture, nostalgia, and an unmistakable sense that she’s chasing something just out of reach. Not perfection, but feeling.
Across projects like Long Way Home, this is (another) film about summer, and back at that party (i was all over her), Georgia captures people in fragments: laughing between conversations, wandering through old places, spiralling quietly, existing in all the blurry emotional spaces that cinema often tries too hard to sharpen. Her camera pays attention to the details most people overlook. Hands fidgeting. Faces blinking. The strange grief of growing up and moving away from the people who once made a place feel alive.
What makes her work especially compelling is the tension she openly embraces: the desire to preserve fleeting moments while simultaneously yearning for movement, change, and expansion. In this conversation, Georgia reflects on nostalgia, experimental filmmaking, close-up cinematography, artistic intuition, and the challenge of protecting rawness in an industry that often rewards polish above all else.
The result is a conversation that feels a lot like her films themselves: intimate, reflective, restless, and deeply alive.
A lot of your films feel less interested in “plot” and more interested in emotional residue, the things left unsaid after a moment passes. What draws you to storytelling that lingers rather than explains?
Georgia: I think one of my favourite things about cinema is that you don’t have to explain things. As much as I love reading, you really do have to explain everything, otherwise it would just be a blank page (I guess a blank page could be a story in itself?) With film, you can see and feel things without words, and there are some experiences we simply can’t put into order. Even though I’m a pretty logical person, I love anything abstract, tonal, or emotionally driven, because it touches on something deep inside us that the logical mind can’t express.
Georgia: I think one of my favourite things about cinema is that you don’t have to explain things. As much as I love reading, you really do have to explain everything, otherwise it would just be a blank page (I guess a blank page could be a story in itself?) With film, you can see and feel things without words, and there are some experiences we simply can’t put into order. Even though I’m a pretty logical person, I love anything abstract, tonal, or emotionally driven, because it touches on something deep inside us that the logical mind can’t express.
In films like *Long Way Home* and *this is (another) film about summer*, memory feels almost physical, like a place the audience is wandering through with the characters. Do you begin your films from images, emotions, conversations, or something else entirely?
Georgia: It really depends on the film! I got the idea for Long Way Home after watching the observational documentary Don’t Look Back (1967) in college class, and I’d never really seen a documentary made that way. Normally it’s talking heads and flashback photos, but there was something so intimate and authentic about just standing in a room with someone. It’s a little voyeuristic, but I love close-up shots—both in movies and when I’m actually filming. I feel like you get to see someone in a new light, like if I’m shooting a gig, I’ll use an XCU on the singer and you can see every frown, blink, and bead of sweat. It’s so intimate, and with a complete stranger! this is (another) film about summer was inspired by Jonas Mekas, who’s home diary movies have influenced loads of my stuff, from films to photography series. I even have a quote from him tattooed on my arm. For writing, I usually get ideas from a quote I see somewhere, an overheard conversation, a song, or a personal memory; with my art films, I might have a song in mind, but I normally just start filming and see what happens!
Georgia: It really depends on the film! I got the idea for Long Way Home after watching the observational documentary Don’t Look Back (1967) in college class, and I’d never really seen a documentary made that way. Normally it’s talking heads and flashback photos, but there was something so intimate and authentic about just standing in a room with someone. It’s a little voyeuristic, but I love close-up shots—both in movies and when I’m actually filming. I feel like you get to see someone in a new light, like if I’m shooting a gig, I’ll use an XCU on the singer and you can see every frown, blink, and bead of sweat. It’s so intimate, and with a complete stranger! this is (another) film about summer was inspired by Jonas Mekas, who’s home diary movies have influenced loads of my stuff, from films to photography series. I even have a quote from him tattooed on my arm. For writing, I usually get ideas from a quote I see somewhere, an overheard conversation, a song, or a personal memory; with my art films, I might have a song in mind, but I normally just start filming and see what happens!
There’s a quiet tenderness in the way you film people, especially in moments that feel awkward, intimate, or transient. How do you build trust with your subjects or actors to capture that kind of vulnerability on screen?
Georgia: Most are of my friends, so I already have a trust built with them. The camera is often quite shaky because I’m trying to snap little shots in while they’re laughing and chatting. I don’t want to make them uncomfortable with the barrel of a lens, so I have to move away quickly, though I tend to film close-up shots from quite a distance using a specific camera setting anyway, so I’m not literally up in their space. A lot of my shots are of the small details, like hands smoking or people walking, so it doesn’t feel as intrusive for the subject, and because I hate having my photo taken, I always make sure everyone’s comfortable with being filmed. For my debut narrative short that I’ve not released yet, it was actually me who felt more uncomfortable filming someone crying or spiralling, even though they were acting! But the actress was super professional, and I eventually got used to holding the camera steady and not having to move away constantly like with my friends.
An oldie but goodie related interview – Arlene Mejorado On Photography, Documentary & Creating Meaningful Work.
Your work often carries this beautiful tension between nostalgia and restlessness, like characters trying to hold onto something while already drifting away from it. Is that emotional in-between space something you consciously return to as a filmmaker?
Georgia: I’m such a nostalgic, sentimental person, which clashes with my constant desire for change and expansion. Some of the films I shot in university, for example, I’ll look back on fondly and a little sadly because I don’t live with all my friends anymore, even though at the time I was itching to break free into my career and own place to live. I’m naturally a very fidgety, restless person trying to execute a million ideas at once (I’m a Capricorn okay!) but places hold such a strong energy for me. Like, if I walk through somewhere I used to go as a teenager, I feel like I’ve stepped straight back into those old feelings, like I’m walking with ghosts, and will even start remembering things I’d forgotten about from that period. As an artist, I think you naturally imbue your work with how you experience life, so it would make sense for that sense to come through.
“Back at that party (i was all over her)” feels deeply personal while still leaving room for the audience to project themselves into it. How do you decide what to reveal and what to leave unresolved in your storytelling?
Georgia: Weirdly, that’s one of my favourite little films I’ve ever made, which is ironic because it was sort of by accident and is less than a minute long! I went on a school trip to Tate Modern and was taking some photos that I probably wasn’t allowed to, but it was a photography trip so I did anyway. I caught my friend in some videos chatting to me and pointing at paintings. I added some music that I had no rights to and edited on iMovie. Simple as that. The quality has downgraded since I’ve lost the original file, but I still love it. I’m now an adult and still trying to capture what I did by accident at sixteen! It probably felt so personal because it was just my friend being natural in the moment. I’m not sure she even knew I was filming (she gave me permission to share it though). Using close-up settings can be really restrictive, but it means you have to get inventive with where you stand and what you focus on, so I sort of let the camera tell me what’s to be revealed.
Your films have a very distinct visual rhythm. They feel almost musical in the way they move through silence, landscape, bodies, and fragments of conversation. How important is editing in shaping the emotional heartbeat of your work?
Georgia: I actually hate editing, but I don’t really trust anyone else to do it in the way I want to, mostly because I do it on intuition. I sync shots to the music, or match cut one frame to another, and just see how it goes really. I found editing my narrative short and recent documentary really hard, as it had talking head interviews and dialogue and continuity etc. that had to be presented in a structured way, and I’m used to having the freedom of experimental art films where there are no rules (which is probably why I love them!)
You’ve created films that have been recognised across festivals, but your work still feels deeply intimate and unpolished in the best way, like it resists becoming overly “manufactured.” How do you protect that honesty as your career grows?
Georgia: It’s something I’ve never really had to think of till now. As a teenager, you can get away with some pixelation and shaky handheld shots, but when artists start commissioning you for music videos, or the council funds you to make a documentary on the local community, you have to bring a certain amount of mainstream polish. That being said, the musicians approached me specifically for my style of filming they’d seen on Instagram. My documentary makes a point of saying how my local creative scene champions a punky ethos of DIY projects that are proudly rough around the edges, so I could get away with it for that film. For my narrative short, I made the unpolished close-up cinematography (inspired by Half Nelson, 2006) an intentional stylistic choice that was emphasised on the casting calls so nobody was expecting 4k HD! I’d love to work on film to keep that authentic, grounded vibe without losing any professional quality, but it’s just so expensive. It’s definitely something I’ll have to keep in mind going forward, but as an aspiring producer, I’ll always hire creatives that maintain that same sense of intimacy and rawness that’s so important to me.
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