Director's Works
Birdie, Canary of Mine Martin Furze
Marty is a director working across commercials, narrative film, and documentary. His work centers on human behavior, power, and the quiet tensions that shape everyday interactions—whether carefully staged or observed as they happen.
A winner of the Next Director at D&AD along with Cannes, YDA, One Show, Clios- his films have won every major award in the creative industry.
He brings a narrative sensibility to commercial work, treating each project as filmmaking rather than messaging. In documentary, he works with patience and proximity, allowing people and environments to define the rhythm instead of imposing one from the outside.
Marty films across continents, seeking out people and places operating at the edges of society—communities under pressure, systems in transition, lives shaped by instability or neglect. His approach is deliberate and restrained: precise framing, natural performances, and a strong attention to place as an active presence.
This film was shot on location and shot on 35mm film.
The decision to shoot on black-and-white film is both an aesthetic and pragmatic choice. Shooting long days in old mines with places you can’t stand upright and there is no air was hard on our crew. It meant that we didn't have time or film to shoot 20 takes of each scene and image. Yes, it demands more from each person, but it also keeps us nimble.
We choreographed claustrophobia—tight frames, heavy shadows, the sense of being swallowed by earth itself.
What emerges from this process is not a conventional period
piece, but something leaner, stranger, and more elemental. It
feels discovered rather than made.
