Up and Coming Yorkshire Filmmaker Ava Bounds on Her New Projects and Future Ambitions
She's Bound for greatness...
Yorkshire has a rich and criminally under-appreciated history in the film and television industry. With its sprawling greenery and breathtaking views, the region can often be seen featured in shows that lean on its atmosphere and drama, including Downton Abbey, Happy Valley, and Peaky Blinders. The inspiration that it provides for creatives is something local director Ava Bounds knows only too well. Based in Wakefield, but originally from the Otley area, Ava is currently attending the Creative and Performing Arts College (CAPA), has already built an impressive foundation for herself as a director, and is invested in all things unusual, local and independent. We caught up with her to find out how she got into filmmaking.
‘I made little iMovies on my iPad back when I was about nine and since then, because my dad is an actor, I’ve been just kind of exposed to his acting. So I then became an actor.’ Aged only 12, Ava appeared on stage for the West End hit The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes in London. No doubt this could have blossomed into an illustrious career on stage for the talented teenager, but Ava had her sights set elsewhere. ‘I realised it looked way more fun behind the camera. So I started in lockdown. I made my first short, a weird little sci-fi short called Players that I used the neighbours for and I submitted that to film festivals all around the world. It started to do pretty well so I thought maybe I should do some more films. Since then I’ve made about five, and each time they’ve got a bit bigger.’
Ava has swiftly become an emerging creative force to be reckoned with in the area, with a number of impressive credits to her name including being the youngest person ever to win the IMDB New Filmmaker award in 2021, an award she was nominated for again in 2023. She is also the winner of the Bolton Film Festival Youth Award, a BAFTA-qualifying festival. Having recently signed her first ever distribution deal, the past few years have been a whirlwind of activity for Ava with little time for a breather, and we wonder if she has noticed a development in her own personal style and technique in light of this baptism of fire.
‘Well I think I’m now starting to realise what kind of films I want to be doing,’ she says. ‘I want to mix the genre of absurdist comedy with deeper subjects. I want to focus more on the female perspective, especially of my age because I know it well. I haven’t really explored that. I want to deal with topics that people my age know like issues with school.’
Ava’s films are refreshingly unique in concept and delivery with surprising and often dark themes, wonderfully paced considering the constraints of such short run times, so we asked her about her preference for short films. ‘I started out with short films and I think everybody does, just to kind of find your voice and find the crew you like to work with,’ she says. ‘The budget for a feature is extreme and these shorts hopefully will make a name for me so I can approach funders and the production companies and hopefully they’ll work with me. But I am thinking of doing a feature length and hope to get it into pre-production in about two years, which doesn’t sound very close but for a feature it is.’ Past projects have covered everything from following an escapee of a Victorian asylum as she reckons with her choices (Beth), to the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous (Dying to Meet You) and an exploration of the emotional cost of the mad cow disease epidemic (What Happened to Molly Doyle’s Cow?).
Ava clearly has a deep well of ideas to draw from, but we can’t help but wonder how these concepts go from free-floating thoughts to award-winning films. ’Usually I start with an image in my head. For example the mad cow disease film was a cow being chopped up by an old woman, and I thought, how can I make that into a film? And so from there I think is there a true story I can try and mould this image around like I did for Beth, as she was an actual person. I just try and build it up.’
With Ava’s films relying so heavily on the stunning Yorkshire landscape to help establish the tone and setting, it is clear that she has a deep and personal connection with the area. ‘It’s just amazing. I went to London for a couple of months just to go to school and it was nothing like Yorkshire,’ she says. ‘Even just going on a dog walk in the fields, that’s what inspired Beth, with all of these vast rolling hills and forests as well. For Dying to Meet You, a film I made about two years ago, we managed to get in all these different locations and fake it so that it looked like 1930s America. There’s just so much and it’s everywhere. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.’
Many people Ava’s age are now reaching a point where they are expected to make crucial decisions about their future and the path they want to go down. With Ava’s career so clearly established already, it seems obvious that she will not be taking the standard route through life. But what will the next 10 years look like for her?
‘My mind is all over the place anyway usually, but especially in the last six months it has been that crunch time: go to uni or not? I’m never going to go to uni because to do a film degree, not to sound egotistical, but I’ve done a lot of the core already,’ she says. ‘It’s a lot of money to invest in something that I would only really get connections out of at the end of the day. I’m thinking maybe an English or Philosophy degree if I want to do something. I just want to stretch my mind and expose myself to all kinds of stories and types of literature and then put that into my writing. Apart from that I’m just going to keep going, keep making shorts and looking for funding on the side.’
With no signs of slowing down any time soon, Ava’s work ethic is a marvel. Since the start of the pandemic she has worked on multiple projects every year, bringing in as much local talent as she can to help support her projects. There’s no doubt more is to come. ‘The feature is just snippets of ideas, but I’ve got a short film that I’m hoping to shoot in January or February time. It’s really about body image, an absurdist, surreal take on a teenage girl’s thoughts on her body, on her zits and her pimples. All of the disgusting stuff that shouldn’t be disgusting. And I’m hoping to make a seven-minute short on that because in recent years I’ve tried to become more personal and I feel like, I don’t know, I just think people would find it a very helpful film.’
