Film graduate’s character-driven black comedy lands major student TV award

Birthday Boy, written and directed by Rosa Brooke, now goes through to the national finals of the RTS Student Awards in June

A Middlesex film graduate’s final year project won a prestigious Royal Television Society (RTS) Student Award for the London region for Best Entertainment and Comedy Drama, after receiving nominations in three categories.

Birthday Boy is a black comedy short about a birthday party that goes calamitously wrong. A chain of events is set off by the death of a cat, and the film draws its energy from the fraught relationship between artist Rae, the gender identity-questioning protagonist, and their father who has come to visit.

Rosa says, and the RTS judges’ remarks concur, that the film’s humour comes from the character situations and the rising tension rather than laugh-out-loud lines. She had vivid ideas to include – such as a birthday volcano oozing guacamole in a Mexican restaurant scene; and she wanted to write about the condition of “knowing who you are and keeping a sense of who you are when people close to you aren’t seeing you”.

Rosa says she intentionally didn’t think too hard about the finished result while writing the script, and that looking back afterwards enabled her to see certain themes come out. "It’s nice, because you can see you are starting to develop your voice,” she added.

A former professional musician who didn’t attend college or university after leaving school, Rosa says she loves directing, because of the variety of people with different skill sets she gets to work with. She’s also enthusiastic about film editing which she finds “very musical - it feels almost gut-level, very rhythmic”. (She doesn’t compose music for her own films however, instead picking suitable playlists, or finding musicians and composers and getting across what she wants to do). 

Rosa valued the atmosphere of Middlesex, the structure the course offered after working as a freelance musician, and the physical spaces in the Grove Building and high quality equipment available to students. The best thing about the programme, she says, was its practical focus on learning by doing. “You’re making things constantly - every month to six weeks, you’re doing something new.”

She enjoyed the open house approach at scriptwriting workshops with Director of Programmes David Cottis, where "everyone can talk and throw ideas back at you - everyone wants to help make it better and improve it," and a similar ethos at directing workshops with Senior Lecturer in Creative Media David Heinemann. 

She started to work with Feline Monke the production designer and Daniel Embers the director of photography on Birthday Boy in their first year at Middlesex, calling them "serious, very talented and creative" colleagues. Other film projects she is proud of from her time at university include Spiral, a drama about a couple's deteriorating relationship.

Rosa's inspirations for Birthday Boy include Emma Seligman's 2020 comedy drama Shiva Baby – which also began as a student short film - and she is an admirer of Greta Gerwig. She loves going to the cinema as often as she can, "for the experience of being in the room with everyone”. She draws creatively from music, sitting down to listen to a new album from start to finish every week, and from reading, particularly classic novels. "Almost half of the job is keeping yourself inspired, feeding yourself with the good stuff," she says.

Dr Helen Bendon, Head of Film at Middlesex said: “We are all very proud of the success of this team and their film. The script is packed with familial tensions in a mature yet darkly humorous story. 

“I remember meeting Rosa at an open day before she joined us on the programme. I could see she was ambitious then, and it’s wonderful to have seen her journey. I wish her and her team every success at the national stages."

Birthday Boy has its international premier at the Cleveland International Film Festival next week, and is also being shown at the Focus Wales Festival and Kingston International Film Festival later in the year.

Find out about studying Film BA at Middlesex University.