WATCH: Short Film Adaptations of All Six Booker Prize Finalists

What was your first reaction when you read the book you were adapting?
The two films I worked on came from texts from The Fortune Men and A Passage North. Booker Prize Foundation Director, Gaby Wood, gave us five or six extracts to choose from. I am drawn to human interest stories and the horrors of everyday life.

It was integral to me as a director to have actors from the communities (Tamil, Sri Lankan, and Somali) so I worked closely with our casting director to ensure this. The actors in both films encompassed multiple roles; narrator, observer, subject. I placed these artists at the heart of the story and let them run with it. I knew I wanted to work with younger actors to engage audiences that might not necessarily follow the prize.

What was the greatest challenge in adapting the book?
Condensing the essence of the book into a minute or so was a welcomed challenge. I wanted to remain loyal to the source material but make sure I was bringing the words off the page in a visual medium. I traveled to Cardiff, Wales to shoot The Fortune Men film to pay homage to the city’s ghosts. Many of the people in the book are long gone, but their ancestors remain, their communities remain, their impact on the city remains. I was pleased to see Nadifa tweet her appreciation of making use of Cardiff. I of course could not film in Sri Lanka, so I made use of a stunning landscape outside of Cardiff for A Passage North. I am super grateful that we were given autonomy and agency from Booker from the beginning in terms of our treatment and where we wanted to tell the story.

Tell us about the scene you chose to feature and how it relates to the whole novel.
For A Passage North, Anuk’s writing is so poetic, yet there are extremely visceral scenes in each chapter. The extract I chose was about grief and part of the physicality of it—flesh, bones, but memories that fade too. It’s quite final. I wanted to be respectful and emotive, immediately thought of the vastness of a sea landscape juxtaposed by something so insular like grief. Paul G Raymond really encapsulates the feeling of hopelessness and sorrow.

For The Fortune Men, I know this story, I know this tale of Mahmood Mattan, but I didn’t know him as a person and wanted to make sure I was doing his memory justice. Looking at the fact he’s a historical figure, a human being that lived and breathed, this is his tale and so many others like it too… I wanted personalize his journey as an innocent Black man in the United Kingdom.

There was something so gut-wrenching about a piece of text set in the 50s about police brutality, racial inequality, and isolation… that is still so prevalent now. I am so proud that Nadifa, a British-Somali author, is the only British author shortlisted for the prize. The book is so well-crafted and gripping, that my film/TV mind immediately saw it for the screen. I’ve had some people DMing me about adaptations, so it shows it’s a very cinematic book.

Elmi is one of those actors that as soon as you meet them, you know you’ve hit a goldmine. Even when we met to discuss the film, he was quoting passages that he’d learned off-book. A fan of the author, it was so evident that he connected with the material from a cultural standpoint. We rarely get to see Somali actors, let alone rising stars (he’s in two features at the moment, Dune is one of them) on the screen or at the forefront of literature. And Elmi’s performance really shone through. It was important for me to use Womanby street, a famous and historical street in Cardiff as a landmark and end on the bay, an ode to the migrant communities of Cardiff at the time.

What do you want a viewer to walk away with after watching your short film?
I think these short extracts are a meditation on the themes of the books, I really hope these snippets entice readers to explore the writing. I think both these books have universal elements: family, grief, isolation, pain, sometimes joy. These are bite-sized human stories.

What are you working on next?
I am fortunate to be incredibly busy as a writer-director and juggling my own original projects alongside writing and directing episodes on other people’s TV shows. But I am super excited to be working on a book adaptation for children’s novel, High-Rise Mystery by Sharna Jackson. MD of King of Sunshine, Sohail Shah has optioned the book and I’ve written the first episode courtesy of funding from the BFI Young Audience Content Fund. High-Rise Mystery is a series of books centered around a young sister detective duo and is published by Knight’s Of. I think adapting two Booker Prize shortlisted books for the screen (!!) has done wonders for my confidence on bringing this exciting book to the small screen.

Born in 1992, Yero Timi-Biu is a British-Nigerian writer-director for TV and film, who has worked with the BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Sky, and Netflix. Yero is also a story editor for audio and worked on The Bias Diagnosis, an original Audible commission. Her award-winning short films Signs and Beneath the Surface have played at international festivals such as Encounters, Aesthetica and the BFI Future Film Festival, where she won a new talent award. Her recent film, 0.5%, was commissioned by BBC Arts and will be released on iPlayer. Yero also recently directed the second unit of Alice Seabright’s upcoming BBC and Amazon TV show Chloe. With over a decade of experience, Yero’s first job was at the BBC during her A-Levels. Now she has original shows in development with various indies—including her first YA novel adaptation for the screen—and was one of Edinburgh TV Festival’s prestigious “Ones to Watch” candidates for 2020.

The Promise, directed by Christine Ubochi and starring David Jonsson (Industry, Deep State, Endeavour)