About:

Steven Sheil is a screenwriter and director. His first feature film Mum & Dad was released in 2008 by Revolver and was the first project to come out of Film London’s Microwave scheme. The film was unique in being the first UK feature to be released simultaneously to cinemas, DVD, pay-per-view and VOD. Mum & Dad won the Méliès d’Argent for best feature at the Leeds Fanomenon festival in 2009 and Best Actress for Olga Fedori at the Fantaspoa Festival in Brazil in 2010. The film was described by Total Film as ‘one of the defining British horrors of its generation’.

His second feature was the action-horror Dead Mine (2012) for HBO Asia, starring an international cast including Sam Hazeldine (Resurrection, Peaky Blinders), Miki Mizuno (Guilty of Romance) and Joe Taslim (The Raid, Fast and Furious 6). Shot in Indonesia and produced by Singapore/Indonesia- based production company Infinite Studios, Dead Mine was HBO Asia’s first original production and was broadcast across South-East Asia in late 2012, following a theatrical run in Asia. The film is distributed in the UK by eOne.

He is also the co-writer of psychological drama Gozo, co- written and directed by Miranda Bowen for Bishop Films and due for release in 2016. Current projects include dark drama Special, developed with with the assistance of Creative England, with producers Jennifer Handorf (The Devil’s Business, The Borderlands) and Alexandra Bentley (The Last Showing), and Sinners, a contemporary adaptation of James Hogg’s classic gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with Glasgow-based Sinner Films, which was chosen for the 2015 Frontières International Co-Production Market.

He also works as a DOP/Camera Operator, primarily with his wife, the artist and documentary-maker Jeanie Finlay, and is the Co-Director of the Mayhem Film Festival, based at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, UK. In 2015, he directed a live stage reading of the previously unmade Hammer Films script, The Unquenchable Thirst Of Dracula, for Mayhem, which Starburst magazine described as ‘a total triumph, giving as near a movie experience as is possible to do in a reading‘, as well as a music video for The Moonlandingz, a collaboration between the Eccentronic Research Council and The Fat White Family, featuring Maxine Peake.