Now in post · release autumn 2026
A feature documentary on four families, a single stretch of Northumbrian coast, and the year the storm was supposed to break it. Directed by Kehinde Ajala, photographed by Lena Weiss.
This is the sixth winter I've spent in Craster, and the fourth film I've made on that stretch of Northumbrian coast. I didn't plan it that way. I had intended, when I first went up in January 2020, to make a single thirty-minute piece about the rebuilding of the harbour wall. The wall was repaired by the April; the film wasn't finished until 2024; and by the time it had aired, three of the people I'd filmed were gone, one of them suddenly. I don't think anyone who has worked on a long film would call that unusual.
The Returning Tide came out of the realisation that I had, without intending to, been documenting a community across five years. What you see in the finished cut is not a rescued thirty-minute idea stretched to feature length — it is four intercut portraits, each assembled from the rushes of successive winters, and each, I hope, standing on its own terms. The film is sixty-two minutes long because the shortest honest version of the argument it wanted to make was sixty-two minutes.
We will release it through festivals in September; a UK broadcast and streaming window will follow in 2027. In the meantime, what follows is a short filmography of the other work Grey Lantern Cinema has made since we spun out from the main studio in 2019 — four features, eleven shorts, one festival premiere pending. Each has its own letter.
The films we made under the Cinema imprint. Dates reflect festival premiere; broadcast or streaming dates follow, varying by distributor.
Four families, a stretch of Northumbrian coast, and a year of weather. A feature documentary assembled from five winters of shooting, examining what stays and what does not when a small place insists on staying small.
Read the director's note →A twenty-six minute short on a three-generation potter's studio in Stoke-on-Trent, and the question of what gets inherited when a craft outlives the family that made it.
Read the director's note →A seventy-eight minute musical documentary in seven parts, each part a single track recorded in a single city. Shot across Europe over the summer of 2024; assembled as a single film with no voiceover, no captions, and no explanatory text.
Read the director's note →A twenty-four minute short on the closing of Britain's last deep-coal mine, commissioned by BBC Storyville. A single family; three generations; the last day above and below the ground.
Read the director's note →Four auteur-led workflows, sharing a single edit suite in Shoreditch and a small post-production team.
BAFTA-nominated documentary director. Long-form feature specialism.
Arts, music and cultural documentary; director-of-photography credits on hybrid work.
Principal DP on all feature-length work since 2021. Shoots both 35mm and digital.
Lead editor and DaVinci-certified colourist. Formerly at a London post house.
Grey Lantern Cinema greenlights four to six projects a year. Submissions are read by the producer and a rotating director; reply within two weeks.