Narrative / 2024

Last Orders

For Offscreen Originals / Directed by

A bartender locks up after her final shift and walks home across the city, meeting four people who each think she owes them something.

Last Orders is a walk home in fourteen minutes. Mara wrote it after a decade of bar shifts between casting jobs, and every encounter in it is lifted from a real night, with the names changed.

We shot over five nights in Glasgow, using the city's orange street lighting as the base of the look. Tomasz Wierzbicki matched it with warm practicals swapped into the existing lamps and a single moving source on a dolly for close-ups, so the light seems to follow her without ever announcing itself. The walking shots were made on a long lens from across the street, with a slow shutter on the busier roads to drag the background into streaks.

The scene in the car is lit entirely by a red neon sign that Hester Vane built for the bar across the road. Ravi Mehta cut the film to the length of the walk, so the screen time and the route match minute for minute.

A driver's hand on the steering wheel as the wipers clear rain from the windscreen at night.
A driver's hand on the steering wheel as the wipers clear rain from the windscreen at night.
A driver's hand on the steering wheel as the wipers clear rain from the windscreen at night.

Credits

Director

Mara Okonkwo

Executive producer

Hannah Reyes

Producer

Olu Adeyemi

Director of photography

Tomasz Wierzbicki

Production designer

Hester Vane

Editor

Ravi Mehta

Colourist

Simon Achterberg

Original music

Callum Reid

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