After recently winning the Yorkshire Short Film Award at this year’s Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF) for his short comedy, Rocket Fuel, Jordon Scott Kennedy spoke to fledgling creatives at Leeds Trinity University’s coveted Journalism and Media Week.
The Dewsbury-born filmmaker spoke in-depth about the struggles he faced after graduating from The Northern Film School in Leeds, where he was taught by Trinity’s very own Ricardo Barker.
He said that after film school “80% of my peers went back to London…so I had to find my own tribe.”
There is disproportionate access for young filmmakers in the north of England as most graduate schemes and pathways into the field are based in London.
Kennedy admitted “the years after film school were a real struggle,” stressing the importance of finding your people within the industry.
The post-graduation period is a tumultuous one for creative hopefuls, to which the Bradford filmmaker advised that you have to “allow yourself some time…and find a way of making money that buys you some time to work on your craft.”
Before working on his first short, Youthless, Kennedy spent most of his working life in retail, before deciding to act on his impulse for cinema.
“I was so glad to be doing something creative rather than serving posh people in a furniture shop…everyone deserves to tell their story.
“You just need to give people an indication of who you are and where you come from.”
Prior to Youthless, Kennedy wrote and directed his debut feature, Suicide Kelly, on a budget of just £10,000 in 2023. His latest work, Rocket Fuel, has won numerous awards, most notably for Best Picture at the BAFTA-accredited British Urban Film Festival this year.
The award-winning director additionally remarked that there needs to be a greater representation of working-class voices in the industry, and to that end acknowledged his responsibility to cast close to home in his work.
“I want someone to walk into my audition who is an expert on my character…they’ve got to completely buy into it.”
He added that studios often choose to shoot working-class stories from an angle of social realism, which often lends no weight to making the stories cinematic or grounded in the lived experiences of those that the story is trying to engage audiences with.
“Why can’t working class-stories be cinematic?” he said in an interview with Director’s Notes.
Kennedy runs the ‘Five Minute Film Club’ at The Unit in Bradford, a community hub for local filmmakers. The club brings together people from different film schools who are encouraged to go out and shoot short films on as small a budget as possible.
“Once a year we have a festival…I’m able to get people opportunities based on where they want to go.”
He gracefully closed out the talk by saying, “I make stuff about me because I find it cathartic.”