FROM SIDNEY,











WITH LOVE

Official Selection - Telluride Film Festival 2025

In July 2023, the film was awarded the Spike Lee Film Production Fund by Professor Spike Lee, the Artistic Director of the NYU Tisch Graduate Film Program, who is also the Executive Producer of the project.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

SPIKE LEE

Convinced that she is Sidney Poitier’s daughter, Rilla, a 9-year-old from an otherwise all-white town in North Yorkshire, runs away to London to meet her father at a screening of his new film, To Sir, With Love, following an argument with her older brother, Nick.

18 Mins, 2025. Fiction. Digital.

Screener link available upon request.

CAST

  • SEKOU DIABY

    NICK

  • Bella Stewart-Halliday

    RILLA

  • Nicholas Pinnock

    EUSTACE

FILMMAKERS

  • East Elliott

    WRITER / DIRECTOR

  • Ella Gibney

    CINEMATOGRAPHER

    Ella Gibney is a New York based cinematographer currently completing her MFA at Tisch’s Graduate Film Program. Ella’s work as a cinematographer includes Sulam (Dir. Noam Argov), which won Best Student Short at the 2023 Palm Springs Film Festival.

  • SUSIE HUNT

    PRODUCER

    Susie Hunt is a short film producer and HETV / feature film production professional. Recent credits include Essentially Painless (starring Niamh McCormack), which is about to enter its festival run, as well as Dirt with Backscatter Productions and MEGAGULPER3000 (starring Hermione Corfield and Jim Carter) with Snapper Films.

  • ALIEA CLARK

    PRODUCER

    Aliea Clark is a producer and 2023 graduate of New York University‘s MBA/FMFA program. Prior to graduate school, she worked for Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on Genius: Aretha, Suzan-Lori‘s first foray into television as a showrunner. Aliea is now based out of Atlanta, Georgia where she works as a management consultant for McKinsey and Co. She is passionate about stories with strong perspectives and dynamic female characters.