Two new biblical shorts announced:Jael Drives the Nail and Our Child

Two weekends ago I had the privilege of being a judge for The Pitch film fund, which offers production finance, support and training to filmmakers, particularly those based on stories from Bible. At stake were two opportunities to get £30,000 funding each to make their short film – one for comedy and one for drama. 

This year we were spoilt for choice and so it's really exciting to know these two films will soon be made, possibly even in the next year.

Jael Drives the Nail

The first is Maddie Dai's Jael Drives the Nail a comedy that takes place in Jael's tent in the moments leading up to Sisera's death (Judges 4:17-24). The story has been a long-term favourite of mine and I was so glad to be able to include the only other major treatment of – Henri Andréani's Jaël et Sisera (1911) – it in my book.

Dai is a New Zealand-born, London-based cartoonist, screenwriter, illustrator and filmmaker, whose cartoons – many of which play with religious/classical ideas – appear in "The New Yorker". As a writer she contributed to the second series of Our Flag Means Death (2023) and wrote the very funny short film Ministry of Jingle (2023) [trailer] which was also her first film in the director's chair.

Dai's degree was in religious art and hopes to make a feature on the Book of Judith, so expect that to influence proceedings, although The Pitch's announcement promises a "modern dark comedic twist" on the subject, which seems to me a perfect way to approach it. I cannot wait to see the final result.

Our Child

I'm also excited to see Anatole Sloan's Our Child, a modernised take on the story of Hagar, Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 16 & 21) relocated to modern day Hong Kong. My favourite take on this story is a comedic one (The Real Old Testament, 2003), so it will be good to see a more serious approach to it, brought into the modern day. Having contributed to an entry for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception on this subject and written a blog post detailing some of the other takes on it and Sloan's approach seems like an excellent way to approach the story.

Sloan is of mixed British-Chinese descent and he has explained how his take on the story, which will revolve around a young surrogate mother, will reflect "issues that I saw growing up in East Asia". Sloan has also professed his desire "to draw on the cinematic language of that region".

Sloan's previous work has been on documentaries, including The Speeches which enabled him to work with an array of household names including Idris Elba, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Olivia Coleman and King Charles III.
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There's a further snippet about these films at the end of this article in Variety.