Charli Siobhan Whatley
WRITER - DIRECTOR - PRODUCER
SHE / HER
Charli Siobhan Whatley is a filmmaker and poet. Her portfolio has screened internationally, she is a BAFTA Connect member, and was selected for the year-long mentorship programme Peckham Rise run by I Like Networking and Market Peckham.
Charli creates character driven work that centres typically stigmatised or overlooked characters in beautiful and empowering narratives. Her work is experimental and spans Narrative, Documentary, Artist Film and Music Videos. She approaches her films with a poetic lens, looking for ways to express characters internal worlds and letting them merge with their external realities, working creatively with editorial structure, sound design and music. Much of her work and the way she collaborates with others is informed by her experience of being queer, neurodivergent, and living with disabling chronic illness.
Charli's first produced work as a writer/producer, Dirty Laundry (dir: Jason Bradbury) won Best British Pilot at Pilot Light Festival 2018. As a writer her horror short Nightwalkers (dir: Jason Bradbury) screened at LSFF, ASVOFF9, FFFMilano and Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival, and art film Social Distortion (dir Stefano Ottaviano) premiered on Schön! Magazine. Her debut experimental short as writer/director, Period., premiered at ASFF 2018 and her 90 second doc Chronically Locked Down screened at Encounters as part of DepicT! and at LSFF 2021. Her two more recent shorts have moved her into narrative drama, Time (writer/director) and a 60 second comedy horror, Burn The Patriarchy (written by Kirsty Smith and produced with other members of BAFTA Crew), which won an Outstanding Achievement Award at Berlin Flash Film Festival.
During the pandemic, Charli co-produced The Lockdown Anthology (2020), a series of short films shot entirely remotely across the UK and USA, with 5 different writer/directors. Her contribution as a writer/director Saturday Roast, featured Kacey Ainsworth and Lauren Corah.
In 2020 Charli was selected to be part of Penguin Books WriteNow scheme for underrepresented writers, and long-listed for their competitive year long mentorship scheme, with an extract from her queer coming of age novel The Middle. In 2021 Charli received a runner up prize for a short story competition run by Curtis Brown and attended one of their creative writing courses. In 2022 Charli’s concept for a feature film was long-listed for the DYSPLA Storymakers Residency.
Commercially Charli has directed and edited a small portfolio of music videos with a particular love for the alternative scene, as well as documentary style content for a range of clients. Her poetry has featured in others work, including the #HereForCulture campaign film for the BFI that played in cinemas across the UK in 2021.
Since becoming unwell, Charli started making music as a way to self soothe and channel some of the physical and emotional trauma that is created by a chronically sick body, turning it into something new and cathartic. She has scored two of her own films, Chronically Locked Down and We Rise (part of trilogy Shapes We Make).
