What’s Next for ‘Rose of Nevada,’ ‘Little Amélie,’ ‘Kim Novak’s Vertigo’ Creators: Tea With Filmmakers

The 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) is already nearing its end. And some of the filmmakers in attendance find themselves discussing their featured movies, while also fielding questions about new project plans.

THR swung by a couple of Filmmaker Afternoon Tea sessions to catch up with some of the creatives at LFF 2025.

Here is a look at key takeaways from chats with the people behind three films featured at LFF and their future plans.

Rose of Nevada – Mark Jenkin (director) and Denzil Monk (producer)

In their time travel drama, set in a fishing village in Cornwall, England, George MacKay and Callum Turner are caught in a time loop. The film is not focused on social issues, but they do show up.

After all, while film and TV often like to put the spotlight on the sphere of rich, privileged Brits, there is also poverty that the world isn’t always shown. “These are different worlds that coexist, and nowhere more so than in Cornwall,” Monk said THR.

“Our film is a period film. It’s set in the present day, but it’s also set in the 1990s which for people of our age seems nuts to think of as a period film, but but that was 30 years ago,” Jenkin told THR. “And once you start investigating what the 1990s looked like compared to now, it’s quite shocking to think that we didn’t have food banks in the 1990s, and now food banks are totally normalized. So I think we’ve got a responsibility to highlight what people might think as being insignificant by putting them in the film without comment. It’s not an overt message in the film.”

In a case of life imitating art, in this case a scene from the film, “Denzil was literally lying in bed having water drip through his roof onto the bed in his own house,” Jenkin shared. “After Mark had written that in,” the producer highlighted. “Talk about ghost stories. I’m really worried about the things that Mark writes now, in case they start happening.”

On-screen depictions of privileged and challenged lives in the UK can both be found. Jenkin highlighted that “there are films out at the moment that show that a lot has changed in a very progressive way in the industry and what’s being represented on screen. But there are also films that are still obsessed with posh British people and how ‘nice’ posh British people historically have been to the poor people.”

The creatives are developing a slate of projects right now, they said THR. “Because I write, direct and post-produce the films, my films take quite a long time,” Jenkin explained. “As I get older, I’ve got to speed the process up a little bit. So we’re putting four things into development that we equally want to do, and hopefully one of them happens, well, hopefully they’ll all go eventually. But we’re not quite sure which will go first.”

So, what’s in the works? couple that I’m writing on my own and two that I’m working with writers.

Little Amélie – Maïlys Vallade (co-director) and Claire La Combe (producer)

Audiences dive into the wonderful world of a little Belgian girl in Japan in the animated movie Little Amélie (Amélie et la Métaphysique des Tubes). The feature directorial debut of Maïlys Vallade (The Lighthouse Keeper; layout and storyboard artist on I Lost My Body and Calamity) and Liane-Cho Han (animation director on Calamity and Long Way North) adapts the short novel The Character of Rain by popular Belgian author Amélie Nothomb.

It is based on a script that the duo wrote with Aude Py and art director Eddine Noël, and it’s traveling the globe.

“It has been sold to more than 20 countries,” La Combe highlighted, including to GKids the US, where it will be released in the coming weeks, Spain, China, and Japan. “Actually, it was really difficult to get to Japan because it was a film about Japan made by French people,” she shared. “They had the feeling it was really odd. So we are very proud that they decided to show this animated movie, because animation is a big part of Japanese culture.”

Vallade highlighted the vibrant colors and other unusual visual elements of Little Amélie. “We used this really atypical style of animation without lines and with flat, solid color,” she said THR. “It was important for us to express sensitivity, color, and light.”

Vallade is continuing to work on other filmmakers’ projects but is ready to bring more stories to life as a director. “I have many ideas for new movies and original ideas, not just adaptations,” she said, sharing some insight into what speaks to her. “I love symbolic and philosophical stories and hugely poetic stories. I have lots of emotions when creating stories. And I love nostalgia.”

Kim Novak’s Vertigo – Alexandre O’Philippe (director)

The documentary takes us inside Novak’s world and her view of it. “She’s a very private individual, but once she lets you into her world, you’re part of the family,” the filmmaker told THR about the screen icon. “She’s very warm. When I’m with her, I don’t have this thought of, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m with the icon.’ She’s a person and a friend.”

That said, Novak can go into icon mode when needed. “I have experienced the way she turns it on when she goes in front of an audience, and it’s quite spectacular,” O’Philippe told THR. “She has that Hollywood Golden Age aura that you just don’t see anymore. And there’s a kind of glamor that is very different from what we think of as glamor today, and that aura is real. It has to be cherished, because it’s vanishing. I mean, she is kind of the last of her kind.”

What’s next for the filmmaker? “I’ve got several projects that I’m working on right now,” he said. “One is a Nosferatu project. It’s essentially two films, so it’s a very ambitious project about the original Nosferatu. There’s also another Vertigo project, which is the reason why I got to talk to Kim in the first place – and then we got sidetracked into making this film. But I want to now continue making another film.”

And that is still not all. “I’m also working on a film about the mafia and mafia movies, the relationship between the mafia and mafia movies. What else? There might be an Evil Dead project. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff!”