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This project successfully funded on 5th March 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
Graffiti
Shetland, Shetland Islands, United Kingdom
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Aim
Help us make GRAFFITI, a short film on grief, loss, isolation, Queer BIPoC joy, resilience and solidarity set in Glasgow, Scotland.
Dear Lovely Human,
We want to make a radical, Queer Scottish short film featuring QTIPoC led filmmaking team and QTIPoC actors with a Shetland based QTIPoC disabled, working class, care-experienced, neurodiverse, non-binary Writer and Director and a QTIPoC producer at the helm.
We can't make this film without your solidarity and support. We’re trying to make something honest, defiant, poetic and full of heart and we really need your help to get it made!
Anything you can donate will all go towards the making of this important, radical, poignant film. Your contribution is invaluable and please know that -
IT’S NOT JUST MONEY, IT’S A STATEMENT THAT THESE STORIES MATTER
At a time when Queer, QTIPOC, BIPOC and trans rights are being debated, erased, and politicised, Queer cinema matters more than ever. It’s how we document our existence. It’s how we push back.
The cast and crew are authentic to this marginalised community - people who live these realities and are claiming space in an industry that too often sidelines us. For us, filmmaking is activism.
We are raising £15k to make GRAFFITI, the actual budget is £15-25k so anything over will be utilised immediately.
Films like this don’t get made without community. Mainstream funding rarely backs Queer, POC, Working Class, disabled stories and definitely not a film that centres all of these experiences at the heart of the narrative. That’s why your support is essential.
QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOUR ARE STILL WRITTEN OUT OF CINEMA:
Only 1.4% of UK films feature a Black or Brown protagonist. Queer characters of colour? Even rarer. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ rights are being rolled back worldwide: from book bans in the US to anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Uganda, to attacks on trans rights in the UK.
To fund GRAFFITI is to invest in a future where Queer, QTIPOC, BIPOC, disabled, working class and woman creatives don’t have to ask for permission to be heard. It’s to say that our stories belong not on the margins, but at the centre of culture.
GRAFFITI refuses to wait politely for change. It insists on Queer, QTIPOC, BIPOC and trans characters who exist without explanation, who are messy and whole, who live through humour, rituals, and heartbreak and offer each other solidarity.
Graffiti must be made now because austerity has made grief structural. Disabled and racialised lives are devalued, yet rarely depicted with truth or tenderness.
Graffiti answers this moment by foregrounding intimacy over spectacle, showing that political resistance can begin in a hallway, a kitchen, a park bench, a shared meal...
Deviji RM Jaan says “For me as a writer-director this story is personal and political. As a disabled, care-experienced, working-class, Queer, Brown filmmaker, their lived experiences offers a direct understanding of the daily negotiations of pain, bureaucracy, and invisibility. Their work listens to what is usually unheard — the pauses, silences, and acts of tenderness that persist within oppression.”
Graffiti is the second short, narrative film from Brown, working-class, disabled, care-experienced, Queer writer and director, Deviji RM Jaan. After years of being repeatedly shortlisted for public BFI/Scottish Screen funding and Disney short films Deviji made her first short film Shön this summer without a budget and crew. Shön is currently navigating the film festival circuit and following this experience Deviji and her team have decided to go down the community funding route. Graffiti is an uplifting, tender, poetic drama set in Glasgow about Queer resilience, solidarity, connection, poverty, grief, community and changing society by small acts of care and radical kindness and solidarity.
PROPOSED PRODUCTION TIMELINE
Kickstarter Campaign – Dec 25/Jan 26/Feb 26
Pre Production – Dec 25/Jan 26/Feb 26
Shoot – LATE Feb 26
Post-Production - March/April/May 26
Finishing - MAY 2025
Sales, Distribution, and Festival Marketing - June 2026 Onward
Director’s statement
“I am a Brown, working-class, disabled, care-experienced, Queer writer and director whose creative practice is rooted in resistance, imagination, and the pursuit of iconoclastic stories. My journey into screenwriting has not been straightforward – I am the first in my family to receive a higher education and my practice been shaped by poetry, performance, theatre and visual art. These disciplines taught me to listen for rhythm, to embrace silence, and to use images and words as carriers of complex truths. Film became the form that could hold all of these impulses together—its capacity for sound, silence, image, and narrative makes it the most expansive and dangerous of mediums, and it is this danger that draws me.
Growing up in the UK, I experienced the silences and erasures of racism, class exclusion, and ableism. These lived realities compelled me towards storytelling as a means of counter-narrative, of making visible what dominant culture insists on overlooking. For me, the screen is not simply a site of entertainment but a contested ground: who gets to be seen, who is silenced, and whose stories matter? Writing for film allows me to confront those questions while opening up imaginative alternatives for survival, belonging, and transformation.
My work to date has been made on crip-time and I insist on compliance with the BFI Diversity Standards at every stage of production. This will be a film that actively seeks to open doors and create opportunities for people from backgrounds underrepresented in the film and television landscape in the UK. I am confident that the final team will be comprised of and led by Queer, trans, and gender non-conforming creatives, and our wellbeing focused approach to running a set will allow for a more diverse crew. I am also an ASSIST trained, Mental Health First Aider, and firmly believe in well-being over working at any cost, which I will be bringing with me into the culture of this film.
It's never been harder to be an artist, and this context includes being a Brown, working-class, disabled, care-experienced, Queer, non -binary filmmaker, in a white, male and middle class dominated industry. I am a proud person and I find asking for help very difficult, but I'm asking for it now as I have tried every other way. I hope that you can please help me achieve this vision and bring Graffiti to life.”
INTRODUCTION TO SOME OF THE GRAFFITI TEAM:
Dorothea Smartt - will play BERNIE
Dorothea Smartt FRSL is a poet/live artist, literary activist, and Coach and a Mental Health Peer Support worker.
With two full poetry collections [Connecting Medium and Ship Shape, Peepal Tree Press], her more recent chapbook Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “is subversive…ultimately…about Black diasporic love.” Her collection Ship Shape is an ‘A’ Level English Literature text. Some of her journal and anthology publications include, ‘Wasafiri’ and ‘The Chicago Review’, the anniversary edition of The Fire People [Canongate, 2022], 100 Queer Poems [Penguin, 2022] and Part of a Story That Started Before Me: Poems about Black British History [Penguin, 2023].
She is a former member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the first Outreach/Development Worker of Europe's first Black Lesbian & Gay Centre in 1985, a former collective staff member of the Sisterwrite Bookshop, Islington, and co-founder of the now defunct Black Lesbian Support Network.
Since 2007 she’s served as Co-irector of INSCRIBE, a national Black & Asian writer development programme, where she continues to support and coach writers.
Her commissioned poems about London’s ‘lost rivers’, are installed on 19 signature ventilation columns across eight new public sites along the River Thames, as a permanent part of the new Thames Tideway Tunnel. In October 2024 was honoured by the Serendipity Institute for Black Arts & Heritage UK among ‘100 Black Women Who Have Made A Mark’.
IG: dorotheasmartt
DOROTHEA SMARTT at Peepal Tree Press
DOROTHEA SMARTT at The Poetry Archive
Deviji RM Jaan - Writer/Director
I am a Brown, working-class, disabled, care-experienced, Queer writer and director whose creative practice is rooted in resistance, imagination, and the pursuit of iconoclastic stories. My journey into screenwriting has not been straightforward – I am the first in my family to receive a higher education and my practice been shaped by poetry, performance, theatre and visual art. These disciplines taught me to listen for rhythm, to embrace silence, and to use images and words as carriers of complex truths. Film became the form that could hold all of these impulses together—its capacity for sound, silence, image, and narrative makes it the most expansive and dangerous of mediums, and it is this danger that draws me.
Growing up in the UK, I experienced the silences and erasures of racism, class exclusion, and ableism. These lived realities compelled me towards storytelling as a means of counter-narrative, of making visible what dominant culture insists on overlooking. For me, the screen is not simply a site of entertainment but a contested ground: who gets to be seen, who is silenced, and whose stories matter? Writing for film allows me to confront those questions while opening up imaginative alternatives for survival, belonging, and transformation.
@devijijaan
@graffitifilm2026
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made