In conversation… 2024’s BAFTA Breakthroughs UK look ahead

For more than a decade BAFTA has been welcoming talented creatives onto our flagship Breakthrough UK programme, supported by Netflix. As we near the end of the 2024 cohort’s year on the programme we gathered some of their thoughts on the programme, the industry and the why we should be hopeful about the future.

Alice Russell (documentary director, If the Streets Were on Fire), Beth Park (performance director, Black Myth: Wukong), Daf James (creator, Lost Boys and Fairies), Luna Carmoon (writer/director, Hoard), Luned Tonderai (director, Miriam: Death of a Reality Star) share their thoughts…

Daf James
On this programme we’re asked to come up with a list of people that we would like to meet, and I kept telling myself I couldn’t put certain names down as I just felt like I didn’t deserve to have a meeting with those people. And the difference in this, of course, is that they encourage you. It allows you to exercise a different type of confidence that I found spilling out into my everyday life and my work.

Luned Tonderai
I’m Welsh, like Daf. And I think it’s a very Welsh thing that you don’t sing your own praises. I can remember distinctly the first email I wrote where I said: “I was selected as one of this year’s BAFTA Breakthroughs for my directing work.” And I was like, ugh, cringing, writing it out. And you just get to a point where you realise: “What’s wrong with you? You need to embrace this.” So it’s about a mentality shift. And it’s quite nice, because actually we all have a little bit of insecurity.

Alice Russell
I didn’t learn film. I taught myself how to make docs, (so) I always have a bit of a feeling of imposter syndrome. It’s validating to have BAFTA say, “Well done, guys. This is a significant thing. People have connected with it.” It gives you the confidence to dream and be daring and try things that before you might have been a bit too scared to. And it’s just wind in your sails when you meet other people who are on a similar path to you.

Luna Carmoon
I think community is completely lost in film in general. To be honest, I think the industry itself is very elitist, and that’s not how I feel when I’m alone in the cinema. I wish there were more spaces where filmmakers could meet and hang out and work and bounce off of each other, which is obviously what’s so great about this. It’s being able to test the thermometer of things with people, especially if you are not connected to anyone in the industry at all – to be able to ask, “Is this normal?”

Beth Park
Because of the way games are made, you have very narrow pipelines of different disciplines. But I think there could be a better way, where the actors and the directors are more involved in the conversations about how this is going to end up as a piece of cinema, because audiences are expecting cinema when they play a game now. I am working with developers where they want to do that, but the teams are just so massive that it’s not something we’re managing to achieve quite yet.

Alice Russell
The sad truth about the indie doc scene is that it is really imploding. There is no money at all. BFI Doc Society are the only independent film funders, and that isn’t a huge pot: everybody in the UK is vying for that money. Indie docs are so important because they are films, often passion projects, that are made over a really long period of time. I just hope that there will come a point in time when we’re able to support those types of films again, because they are being supported in Europe, just not in the UK. But that’s not specific to docs. It’s just art in general, right? It’s devalued.

Beth Park
If you’re going to give up your evening to play a game, it better be entertaining. It better be fun. So I think the more we have institutions like BAFTA and Netflix putting interest and investment into making those kinds of games, the more audiences we can retain.

Luna Carmoon
The experience of making a film is always very intense. I love the scandal that runs underneath the film set. And I love getting to meet all my crew. For me, there’s no hierarchy. Everyone has lunch together, from gaffers to makeup to actors, and everyone gets to learn about each other’s lives.

Luned Tonderai
When I was coming up through TV, if I had an idea that was anything to do with Wales or the Welsh language, I was always told: “Nobody’s going to be interested in that, other than S4C or BBC Wales.” And that’s not true. I was a big fan of Lost Boys and Fairies, because I just thought: “This is really authentic. This reflects what I know.”

Daf James
I definitely think there’s room to be hopeful. I felt like it was a minor miracle that Lost Boys was commissioned in the first place, because it was the first bilingual Welsh-English drama on network, and it was a queer adoption story on prime-time BBC One. And that’s progress, on many political levels. And I feel incredibly lucky that I happened to be alive in the time where those opportunities were arising, and I got to tell that story.

Both James and Tonderai were honoured at the 2025 BAFTA Cymru Awards. Tonderai won in the Director: Factual category for Miriam: Death Of A Reality Star and James’ successful Lost Boys and Fairies won five awards in the categories for; Actor, Director: Fiction, Editing, Television Drama and Writer.

• Alice Russell, Beth Park, Daf James, Luna Carmoon, and Luned Tonderai are all participants in 2024’s BAFTA Breakthrough UK, supported by Netflix. The initiative showcases and supports the next generation of creatives in film, games and TV, helping leverage early success into sustainable careers. The 2025 BAFTA Breakthrough UK cohort will be announced in November, keep an eye on our programme page to be the first to know who has been selected.