Daughter: Three Films

Three Films is a trilogy of short films made for Daughter’s second album, Not To Disappear, released by 4AD in January 2016. Each film takes one song. Each is led by a different actor. The three share a stretch of coast, a red dress, a handful of recurring faces and a set of small connections that only come into focus once all three have been watched.

The films were developed alongside the band finishing the album. The band would share strands of music and ideas, they discussed the themes running through the record. Using this as a starting point, Forsyth & Pollard began by commissioning three short stories from Stuart Evers, a writer whose work they had long admired. The stories shared a common thread, a red dress and were titled 5040, Dress and Window.

Working with Vanessa Farinha and Cara Barry of The Nothing, Iain & Jane adapted the stories into scripts. Writing came first, and when the three were finally selected from the album tracklist they were given room rather than illustrated. 5040 became How, Window became Numbers and Dress became Doing The Right Thing.

The films were shot in Margate and Ramsgate, on the Kent coast, across a single three-day shoot squeezed in before the band left on tour. Working that fast on three interlocking films meant holding the whole trilogy in view at once, and the constraint shows in the work: three stories photographed as one place, in one week of weather.

“Doing the Right Thing” came first, released in October 2015 as the album’s lead single. Richard Syms plays Harry, an older man watching his wife lose her memories and fade, the film intercuts clips from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (1963) on the TV in the living room. “Numbers” followed featuring Natasha O’Keeffe, and “How” featuring Marama Corlett, completed the trilogy in February 2016.

The trilogy was filmed by Chloë Thomson, edited by Rachel Spann and graded by Tom Balkwill at Dirty Looks, and produced by Vanessa Farinha for The Nothing.

Forsyth & Pollard had worked with Daughter since the band’s first video, and Three Films is the most extended of those collaborations: not three promos made to a schedule, but one commission treated as a single piece of work with three ways in.