2026 RIIFF Filmmaker Spotlight Series: Afterburn, directed by David Cordon
Article Written By Roman Olavarria
In his work Afterburn, David Cordon breaks down the difficult process of grief and how opening up to others can be a step toward intentional healing over something as difficult as the loss of a loved one. The excellent use of multi-perspective narrative structures and a timeline that slowly reveals the connection between the characters, Cordon depicts a varied process of grief and loss and how different people cope with such an event. The indulgence into these different reactions is highlighted through the plot and realistic performances by lead actors Charlotte Pyke and Ayamé Belkin. In asking Cordon during the time of the festival what the film was exactly about, he stated, “grief,” and that is well-put considering a viewing of this piece allows audience members to reflect on their own experiences of grief and how they may see themselves or not see themselves in the characters and their journey. Additionally, congratulations to the Afterburn team for winning the First Prize for the Vortex, Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror Award at the RIIFF awards ceremony!
Roman Olavarria: You’ve worked on a range of projects such as Avengers: Endgame and Annihilation as a VFX artist, producer, and manager. How did this background or any other experience inform some of the visual language of the film?
David Cordon: Visual effects did have a profound impact on how I think about composition, aesthetics and balance. I’ve been influenced and inspired by all the great artists and supervisors I’ve worked with over the last eleven years. By the thousands of hours spent in dailies dissecting images to the very pixel. And by being in the room with, and later collaborating directly with, many great directors and producers. It all adds up. But if we’re concentrating on Afterburn specifically, part of that visual language needs to be attributed to David Foulkes, the cinematographer, who I’d wanted to work with for a while and always believed was perfect for this film. We share a love for subtle decay, and we both like finding beauty in unlikely places. He has a very special sensitivity for it. And what’s most important to me, he approached this from a truthful place by integrating layers of texture optically, always to serve the picture, never to dress it. I think that’s one of the things straight photography does to you, which is another passion we share in common.
RO: What was it like working with writer Tatty Hennessy on this project? Did her background in writing for specifically live theater steer the direction of the film in interesting ways?
DC:It’s good that we’re having the chance to learn and grow together in this medium. Everything is much easier when you click, when you understand and respect each other, and when every conversation is just about how to make it better, no matter what.
It’s really hard and very rare to find someone who is incredibly talented but who also shares a lot of your core values and enjoys the same tonal subtleties when approaching a theme. I feel very privileged and very lucky to be working with her.
In terms of her experience as a playwright and what it brings, the real blessing is that her skillset genuinely complements my directorial approach, and it travels the other way too. Theatre is a lot purer than film. It doesn’t have as many resources as we do in film and tv production. You can’t smash cut or drop in an insert. Playwrights are obliged to maintain psychological tension relying only on actors and mise-en-scène. There’s just nothing else. And so they become incredibly sharp at scene writing.
RO: What were some of the biggest challenges in depicting grief on screen? What were some of the methods involved in collaborating with the actors to be able to depict grief in Afterburn?
Grief is probably one of the most universal emotional states humans share, but I think we rarely stop to consider what it actually does to us. It isolates you. It convinces you that nobody else could possibly understand what you’re going through. And because of that, it changes your behaviour . We all become experts by necessity in learning to bury the pain and mask it with different layers. Some people shut down completely; others perform normality so convincingly that no one around them realises what’s happening underneath. That’s what we were most interested in exploring. Not the grief itself, but the coping mechanisms, the performance of being fine, and what happens when that mask slips. Freya has built an entire way of being around not falling apart, and Agnes thinks she can see right through it. That tension is the very epicentre of the film.
We were lucky that both Ayamé and Charlotte had something personal to relate to, and they had good chemistry between them.
RO: Speaking of the actors, Afterburn features Ayamé Belkin and Charlotte Pyke as the two women leads of the film. How do you think expressions of grief between women have been shown in previous films? How did this inform the team about building up this antagonized relationship?
DC: What makes grief between two people so volatile is when they are both going through it, but they are handling it in completely opposite ways. Each one’s way of coping can feel like an insult to the other. That’s where the antagonism comes from in the film, not from disliking each other, but from neither being able to accept how the other grieves.
In terms of the actors, we deliberately avoided referencing other performances. Acting is such an intimate form of expression that it has to come from inside each actor, as raw as possible. We didn’t have a lot of time to prep, for budgetary reasons. We only had one proper rehearsal. But we made the most of it by having deep, open conversations about who these women are and where they’re each hiding. The rest was both of them taking what we’d explored and doing a lot of work on their own.
RO: The film ends on a positive note—at least more reflective than when it started. What do you imagine happens to the characters next, considering the non-linear healing process of grief?
DC: It’s funny, because I’m a very positive person and I’ve always made the most of everything I had available at the time. I’m lucky to have been born with a cheerful personality. But if you don’t know me and judge me by what I’m drawn to as an artist, you might get a very different impression. So far, aside from a beautiful upbeat short animation we haven’t been able to make yet, all the pieces I’ve written or co-written are pretty dark, tense, and some people would say controversial. I’m drawn to difficult emotional territory because these are things that have tormented me directly in the past, or that I’ve thought about in great depth and need to get out of my head. I want people to sit with things that aren’t comfortable. But ultimately, I believe in good and in the natural course of balance. So I hope the characters take their experiences and find acceptance and redemption.
RO: Do you have a favorite moment or line in the film? What makes it your favorite?
DC: My actual favourite moment from the film didn’t make it into the final cut, sadly. It was an improvised hug that came from Agnes while saying goodbye to Freya at reception. It was the second take, and I asked Ayamé to go for it without telling Charlotte, which triggered an honest emotional reaction between the two. But I’m really pleased and really proud of the acting throughout. It’s important to remember that Ayamé had never placed herself in front of a camera like this before.
RO: What are some projects you have coming up? Anything that you are particularly excited about?
DC: Quite a lot, actually. We’re currently heading into pre-production for our next short, Ex Humo, which is a project I’m particularly excited about. Tatty Hennessy and I wrote it as a short, but the world could extend well beyond that. The question the film keeps circling is how ordinary people are trained to look away and how systems survive by convincing the people inside them that certain lives don’t quite count. We wanted to explore that through something visceral and physical rather than rhetorical, so we’re staying within genre but stepping more into psychological horror. We’re also in development for our debut feature, Shoal. A heightened, eerie, darkly comic story of a man realising his perfect home is not what it seems when his girlfriend goes missing. Both projects are interested in the same thing, at the core of it. What happens to people inside systems that distort how they see the world. We’re having a lot of fun with it.
