Each year we invite filmmakers from all over the world to submit their short films of 90 seconds or less to our DepicT! competition. In this post, we return to a DepicT! double award-winner to hear about what he's been up to since his big wins.

In September 2014 emerging British filmmaker Daniel Chisholm picked up an impressive two DepicT! awards for his captivating short Nati at the Awards Ceremony at Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival. Daniel took home both the DepicT! British Special Mention Award and the DepicT! Shooting People Audience Award, and won a whole host of career development opportunities with BAFTA, the National Film and Television School and Shooting People.

Image by Jon Craig

His winning DepicT! '14 film follows 90 year old Nati, who lives in the Ligurian mountains in Italy and spends his days tending to his olive trees. This short forms part of a feature length project Daniel's working on that aims to capture the life and times of this special village of farmers on film.

In November 2014 we talked to Daniel two months on from his DepicT! '14 win and heard about his last shoot as well as some of the characters he's been working with, like Alessio - a tree climbing farmer in his 80s no less!

Watch Daniel's winning film below and read more about his filmmaking journey four months on from his big win:

DepicT! '14 Four Months On - by Daniel Chisholm

Happy New Year! (Auguri! as they say in Italy)

2015 began with a bang, with more filming in Italy for my planned feature documentary and even some fun New Year's celebration drinks with the titular, nontogenarian star of Nati and some of the other farmers in the village. We had a brilliant time chatting and playing with one of the village's visiting grandsons, a feisty little 7-year old, who already drinks wine from his daddy's glass, which apparently is not at all uncommon in the area. I don't think I had acquired the taste at that age, but it seems to encourage moderation, as none of the farmers seemed to drink more than a couple of glasses of an evening, not even at the villages' New Year's Eve celebrations! It was still fun though, with some superbly delicious local food!

Nati is still on form and working hard on his vegetable garden, though the olive harvest this year was uncommonly poor due to unusually strong rain-fall. Apparently next year's "racolta" (harvest) promises to be all the better as a result though, so fingers crossed!

Unfortunately Alessio, the farmer whom I had mentioned in my last report and whom we were hoping to do follow-up interviews with in January, had a fall from an olive tree (not an unusual occurrence in the profession apparently)! Luckily it wasn't too serious, but it did keep him out of the trees for a while, and also meant we couldn't grab him for filming. Luckily he is on his feet again and feeling better now though, so hopefully we will be able to catch up with him in the coming months.

We did however manage to shoot some material of the local farmers meeting up for their daily card game in the evening, with lots of jokes and taunts being thrown about the room during the game, which was very entertaining and will undoubtedly be a cornerstone of the edit for the film.

In other news, I have a new showreel and website in the pipeline, which I am very excited about! Hopefully that will also make it easier to approach production companies and agencies in the coming year.

I'm also planning to attend the Berlinale in February, which should hopefully be fun and a good warm-up for this year's Encounters and DepicT! ' 15.

Speaking of which, I saw in a recent post that the submissions are now open for Encounters - I'd better go and see if there's anything that I can submit!

Have a wonderful start to 2015 everyone and catch you in the next post soon!

Dan

Find out more about the DepicT! challenge on depict.org

---