About scallabouche
We are a group of four middle-aged filmmakers and theatre artists with over 100 years of combined experience across film, theatre, cinematography, editing, writing, and acting. United by a shared passion for storytelling, we have come together to experiment with a unique creative process: improvising a film. Since 2023, each year we have created a short film through improvisation and devising, with the intention to eventually weave all our films together by 2027 into a single long-form narrative, akin to an ongoing improvisational journey.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create stories that reflect the experiences, struggles, and desires of our age group, specifically those in their mid-life, asking profound existential questions about dependence, identity, and the passage of time. We are driven by the need to explore unfulfilled dreams, the cost of survival in an ever-changing world, and the shifting political landscape of Central Europe—where our personal histories as British and Hungarian filmmakers intersect
Through the lens of ambiguity and subtlety, we aim to trigger the imagination of our audience. By using techniques such as voiceover, minimalism, and the deliberate withholding of information, we invite our viewers to make their own connections and interpretations. Our approach is to create a big picture using the limited resources of low-budget filmmaking, trusting that the audience’s engagement will be more fulfilling than simply providing them with all the answers.
As filmmakers working in Hungary under a highly restrictive, authoritarian regime, we strive to create free, independent art—stories that question, reflect, and provoke thought. In a country where state-sponsored cultural projects are expected to conform to the ideals of the ruling powers, our work exists as an act of resistance—a voice of personal freedom and reflection.
Ultimately, we are interested in finding producers and other partners to collaborate in this journey and co-create films that speak to our shared human experiences, telling stories that resonate across borders and cultures, and offering our audience the space to reflect, dream, and imagine freely. Our films are a meditation on the passage of time, the personal intersection of histories, and the delicate balance between the ideals of youth and the realities of adulthood.