For months, I worked near full-time on one idea: a short film titled A Place to Play. The film follows an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child (UASC) who flees local care and finds refuge in an industrial warehouse overseen by a Scrooge-like security guard. The boy, ferociously creative, uses the warehouse as a workshop for his art – constructing castles, dioramas, and puppets from scrap materials. The guard, a musician keen to practise on company hours, seeks out the trespasser, resulting in a game of cat and mouse, each vying for space to play. In their chase, they would find their artistic pursuits coalescing into unintended collaboration.
On one level, it was an idealistic effort to represent two bitterly divided groups in British society: the working-class and the immigrants (even though many belong to both groups). It was a dream of British social cohesion, anchored in kitchen-sink realism to remind the audience that both parties were resisting the same forces of enveloping precarity, a film for those lowest strung. My agent, seeing no room for financial return, was utterly uninterested.
Regardless, we built momentum quickly with various household names keen to attach themselves to the project – a real surprise for a short film made by a nobody filmmaker. It was coming together, production was in full swing, sets were being designed, casting had begun, and we were buzzing off our public announcement of the project. Then, the very next day, my mother was in a freak accident.
A Place to Play was halted and I would find myself living in hospital waiting rooms for months on end. It was a devastating time for my family. With no money and no time to work, my agent dropped me. Interest in A Place to Play had faded, our collaborators had moved onto other projects, and social divisions in the country were mounting.
Starting with the Bell Hotel in Epping, anti-immigration protests mutated rapidly, not only among the far right, but among the disillusioned working-class that for too long faced the brunt of austerity measures and neoliberal policy. Further, the mass media became hyper fixated on images of ‘military-aged’ hordes on dinghies – images harnessed by the right to emphasise criminality and feed fears of ‘invasion’ – and statistics almost always divorced from any wider context, serving to remind the struggling British taxpayer of the benefits that these criminals reap at their expense.
Consulting with leadings scholars on the UK’s asylum system such as Professor Jonathan Darling, revealed the extent of the complexities and contradictions of this issue: the profiteering housing providers, the lack of safe legal routes, the historical use of hotels as temporary accommodation, decelerated processing times, work restrictions, the threat of trafficking, and the destitute conditions many asylum seekers find themselves in after approval. Whilst the truth is that good and bad exist in all corners of society, asylum seekers were subject to a politically fruitful campaigns of conflation and misinformation.
Tackling this the only way I know how, I began working on a script that would highlight what is, on average, the reality of asylum conditions in the UK. It would be called Stop Gap, a British colloquialism for a temporary, make-shift solution. And as is the case for many asylum seekers, their existence in these hotels is only a temporary part of a longer struggle that begins well before they arrive and is unlikely to end soon after. The boy protagonist would remain in this story but now he would be confined to an asylum hotel – a ‘last resort’ measure for UASC before taken into local care – his perspective, a stark insight into the conditions of the hotels. Still spending my days waiting in hospital corridors I, alongside a small team, began coordinating pre production for the film.
With no money, no more big names attached, no agent, no institutional support, and wide-scale resentment from the public that regarded the film as pro-immigration propaganda, our back was once again against the wall. Except this time, we did not aspire towards idealism. This time we were fighting alongside charities such as Young Roots to present a nuanced depiction of a much-maligned truth. The film is not about good (refugees) vs evil (Brits), or any other narrative binaries.
Instead, the film looks at moments of human connection set against the layered bureaucratic blocks in the system, the disrepair of society and the ironies of humans struggling to improve their conditions. So, in all the darkness, we emerged from the other side…somehow. And though I write this article still in hospital, shooting for Stop Gap concluded in September 2025.
As a non-profit project, we plan to screen the film in community centres, workshops for young people and refugees encouraging conversations about the issue and supporting young people access filmmaking. As of writing we have raised 20% of our £10,000 target and are yet to complete post-production until expenses are covered. We’ve already raised 20% of our £10,000 target. Every contribution takes us closer to making this happen. Support the film here
