Myrid Carten

Myrid’s breakthrough project is documentary A Want in Her.

Working at the intersection of documentary and fiction, Myrid takes risks to create singular work. Drawing on her Fine Art background, she playfully combines mediums and styles to enable viewers to “understand information through experience instead of exposition”.

Myrid has known she wanted to work behind the camera since she was a teenager. An early experience as an actor, combined with the impact of films like Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, ignited something in the budding writer-director. “They were lights in the dark that I still feel I’m following”, she says, “because they were my first introduction to a cinema of autonomy, grief, maturity, beauty, desire and agency”.

In her BAFTA-nominated breakthrough project, the feature cinematic documentary A Want in Her, Myrid returns home to find her missing, troubled mother, but risks losing herself in the process, creating an immersive, first-person account of the cost of love, and how difficult it can be to escape.

In her own words…

“For the project, I sought collaborators – producers, story consultants and editors – who worked in that fiction space, understood dramaturgy, were intuitive with images – people with a philosophy and love of cinema. And DPs who wanted to push the form of the film forward.

“I’m fascinated by relationships, how we project onto and fantasise about each other. And cinema is the most intimate way to view people without inhabiting them (as writing can).

“I want to make films that explore the value of human beings (especially in our technological time), the beauty, the brutality – how we cling to our cages and the capacity we have for freedom.”