Best Female Director Award

7 Hours on Earth’s Pat Sharpe wins Best Female Director

 

The feature film continues it’s film festival success, this time with director Pat Sharpe winning an award at Boden International Film Festival (BIFF) in Sweden, for best female director. This is a proud moment for Nostairway Creative as we completed all the post production on this feature film, and our Creative Director was also a producer on the project.

 

 

 

7 Hours on Earth is an indie, sci-fi, teen comedy about aliens that accidentally land at a high-school and take over the bodies of humans for 7 hours. They spend this time dealing with the chaos of human relationships, adolescence and a school play. It is a lighthearted, fun watch for all ages and the most unique part? It was entirely made by a school. The ‘best female director’, Patricia Sharpe, is a secondary school teacher who thought it would be a good exercise for her pupils to create a feature film.

She put the idea aside for years, until discussing it with other female teachers at the school and pointing out that “…men push ahead with things and women don’t” while “Women always wait for someone to give them permission”. Pat realised that this was exactly what she was doing, waiting for someone to give her permission. And that is when she decided to go ahead and get the project started, which would later . These quotes were taken from an article about the project by The Guardian, which you can read here.

 

 

Not only was this a great exercise for the students in regards to teamwork, practical filmmaking skills and project management, it was also educational on an academic level as the film is also a modern adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every part of the filmmaking process, aside from the post production completed by Nostairway, was done by the students, staff and parents of Graveney. This USP is what got the attention of the press and festivals worldwide, recently awarding her as Best Female Director.

 

 

The Guardian, notoriously strict with their reviews, even gave the film a 3 out of 5 star review, not bad for a feature film made mostly by school kids! The review described the film as a “good-natured, charming and energetic comedy” and noted that, now award winning best female director, Sharpe “coaxes some fantastic performances from her students, most in front of the camera for the first time”.

Best Female Director is not the first award this film was taken home, as it also won Best Music at the Sochi International Film Festival in 2021 and Best Comedy at the Screen Power Film Festival, also in 2021.

You can ready up about the cast of the film in our previous articles, finding out who they are and where they are now, following the success of this feature film.  Nostairway would like to congratulate everyone who worked on the production of this uplifting film, from the students, to their parents, to the school staff and anyone else who contributed. It was an inventive, creative and effective way to teach the kids and encourage them to pursue any creative ambitions they may have now or in the future, showing them anything is possible if you believe in a project.

A particularly big congratulations on this occasion to Pat Sharpe, who after years of teaching secondary school English and Film Studies, brought back her filmmaking skills from her past and created something everyone can enjoy. Women still have to fight harder to get ahead in this industry, as in many others, so awards which specifically promote female filmmakers are still essential and important for them to gain the fame they deserve. So well done Pat on winning Best Female Director! We can’t wait to see what you do next.