The Cost of Bronze
When two feuding sisters return home to execute their late mother’s will, they discover her plan to rewrite the story of their broken family.
When their mother dies suddenly, sisters Ally and Cecily must overcome their estrangement to execute her will. Trying to sort through the fragments of their old, fractured lives forces them instead to sort through their grief, resentment, and guilt— towards their mother, and towards each other.
As the feuding sisters try to piece together each other's involvement in what happened to their mother, they find themselves following an audacious plan laid out in her final days, to bring her daughters back together.
The Cost of Bronze is about grief, thebonds and duties of family, and the power of art to connect and reconcile. Above all though, it is the story of a woman’s rage against the dying of the light- and her refusal to be erased from her own story.
The Cost of Bronze represents the culmination of a challenge I set myself as a writer and director to explore stories beyond my direct experience, and to inhabit a dramatic form I'd yet to explore in my work- social realism, where character interiority remains a powerful, but unknowable force. As an emerging filmmaker I recognised that telling a simple story well, in a naturalist setting that set aside the structural and aesthetic bulwarks I'd leant on in earlier work.
I immersed myself in the tradition of great humanist filmmakers and films in which houses become characters in themselves; Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. I learned to use the perspective of the house itself to observe characters, and discovered how to create presence by accepting and exploring absence.
I leant into contemporary portrayals of complex women grappling with the heavy chains of circumstance, trauma, grief and memory, such as Jessie Buckley in Beast, Ellie Kendrick in The Levelling, and Ruth Wilson in Dark River. Representations of sisterhood from Bergman and Abi Morgan in The Split helped refine my observations of similar dynamics in the relational dynamics around me.
This film marks my first collaboration with producer Alexandra Da Silva, a rising star from the theatre world, director of photography Ed Thomas, and editor Sarah Bright. We were supported by executive producer Samira Musa, and post-production services handled by Goldcrest Films and Adrian Lo of Rotor Film.
Our story was anchored by the talents of its cast- Alice Sanders, Abi Corbett, and Catherine Cusack. They invested deeply in the unspoken story of this family, finding moments of subtle power in reactions and glances, and what is left unsaid. Hannah Marie Williams proved an invaluable ally in the casting process
The Cost of Bronze is currently in its festival submission cycle- please contact us if you wish to preview the film online.