The Long Field premieres at Northlight Film Festival

The Long Field, Yuna Sato's short for Offscreen Originals, has its world premiere this week at Northlight Film Festival, where it was chosen for the Official Selection. It screens twice in the short film competition, on Thursday evening and again on Sunday afternoon, and Yuna will be there for both, along with cinematographer Ama Boateng and producer Kenji Arata.

Northlight has been good to us. Annelise Vogt's Low Water was in the Official Selection in 2024 and Theo Lindqvist's Southbound last year, and it is a pleasure to be back with a film we developed entirely in house.

The film

The Long Field runs twenty-two minutes and has eleven lines of dialogue. After her father's funeral, a woman walks out across the snowfield behind the family farm and keeps going, unsure what she is looking for. Most of the story is told by distance: how far she is from the house, and how small she becomes against the snow.

We shot it over twelve days in February in Innlandet, Norway, with a crew of fourteen and a snowcat to move the kit. Ama chose a large-format camera and a pair of long primes so the figure could stay tiny in frame without losing detail, and lit the farmhouse interiors with nothing but table lamps and the window. Hester Vane kept the costume to a single note of red so the figure reads at any distance.

Getting it to the screen

A festival premiere is a delivery like any other, only less forgiving. Freya Lund locked the cut in May, and Simon Achterberg graded it for the cinema first and the small screen second, which meant a week of checking the snow on a projector rather than a monitor. Snow is unkind to compression and unkind to projection. Too bright and it clips to a white wall; too grey and the whole film looks tired.

Tobias Wren mixed the sound for a large room. The soundtrack is mostly wind, footsteps and silence, and silence is the hardest thing to mix: the room tone has to be quiet enough that the audience leans in, and present enough that nobody wonders whether the sound has failed. We sat through two test screenings in a London cinema before signing it off.

Who made it

Marcus Bell executive produced the film from our Los Angeles office, with Kenji Arata producing on the ground in Norway. Alongside Yuna, Ama, Hester, Freya, Simon and Tobias, it relied on a local crew who knew how to keep cameras, batteries and people working at fifteen degrees below zero, and on the family who lent us their farm for most of a month.

What comes next

The Long Field will travel to further festivals through the rest of the year before going online. If you are at Northlight, come and find us after either screening. If you are a programmer and would like a screener, write to the London office and we will send one.