Memento Summer: Two Independent Short Films

Aim

Funding Memento Summer: two bold short films by young women exploring body image, perfectionism, alienation and belonging.

We’re Noor and Ella, co-founders of Memento Pictures. This summer, Memento Summer, we’re making two bold short films exploring the pressures shaping our identities as young women today - from body image and perfectionism to cultural alienation and belonging.

THE PROJECTS

Sugarcoated logline:  

On her eighteenth birthday, a teenage girl’s attempt at perfect femininity slowly unravels into psychological horror.

O Country! My Country! logline:

A second-generation immigrant considers taking up belly dancing to reconnect with her Lebanese heritage, forcing her to confront what it means to be a woman of colour in Britain today.

Though different in subject matter, style and form, both films focus on young women attempting to navigate environments rooted in themes of visibility, performance, shame, and the impact of constantly feeling watched by the world.

As filmmakers, we are drawn towards the blend of thriller, social-realism, and pressure-cooker genres because they serve as the most interesting devices to explore the personal and emotional decisions made under society’s restrictive systems. We are interested in stories where tension accumulates slowly through atmosphere, behaviour, and emotional contradiction rather than dramatic exposition.

Most importantly, we want audiences - particularly young audiences - to recognise themselves within these stories. Not necessarily through plot, but through feeling, expression, and emotional release. Through the recognition of this pressure we all feel to remain acceptable, controlled, palatable, desirable or easy to label.

Sugarcoated

Written and Directed by Ella Novie

Synopsis

Beneath the surface of her vibrant birthday celebrations, Missy is quietly battling impossible expectations to look and act perfect. As the day unfolds, every detail begins to slip - her body, her appetite, her friendships, her sense of control.

Surrounded by curated smiles, passive cruelties, and unspoken competition, the party transforms into a suffocating performance of girlhood. As Missy fluctuates between how she feels and how she performs, reality begins to distort. Socially acceptable conversations and table manners sharpen into something sinister, exposing the gruesome cracks beneath “perfect” femininity.

This is a story about girlhood under pressure - where perfection is expected, appetite is feared, and even a birthday becomes something to survive.

Director’s Statement

Around 40–60% of girls aged 5–10 are already concerned with their weight. By age 10, 1 in 3 girls have already tried dieting.

Every year, I cry on my birthday. Without fail. For a long time, I thought this was something wrong with me, but after speaking to my friends I realised we all shared a similar experience. Birthdays, which should mark joy, have increasingly become performances: carefully constructed displays of perfect femininity: perfect friendships, perfect bodies, perfect behaviour, epitomising the constant surveillance women endure.

The so-called “cattiness” of girlhood does not come from girls themselves, but from the systems that shape them. From an early age, we are taught to look at ourselves from the outside - to monitor, compare, and correct. Posters, advertisements, social media, routines, wellness rituals, all reinforce the same message: be better, be smaller, be more controlled. These pressures are rarely spoken aloud. Instead, they discreetly settle in our psychology, shaping how we see ourselves and each other. With so much of the world outside our control, we begin to fixate on what we can control, such as our bodies, our food, our image.

I wanted to create a film that captures this tension without overstating it. Because in everyday life, these struggles can feel small, even meaningless. We tell ourselves others have it worse and minimise what we’re feeling. But that quiet acceptance is part of the problem. 

Ultimately, this film is about the pressure to perform, and what happens when that performance begins to break.

O Country! My Country!

Written and Directed by Noor Kabbani 

Synopsis

On her walk home from work, a second-generation Lebanese woman contemplates learning belly dancing as a way of connecting with a heritage she feels both tied to and estranged from. When Mina mentions the idea to her mother and grandmother over the phone, a casual conversation opens up deeper tensions around identity, assimilation, and inherited shame. 

Moving through the landscape of her everyday life - carrying memories of all the places she’s connected to - Mina wrestles with what it means to be British, Lebanese, and caught somewhere painfully in between. She is unable to speak her mother tongue fluently, cook traditional food, or fully inhabit the cultural connection she longs for.

Set against rising nationalist rhetoric and Britain’s entanglement in global violence, Mina confronts the dissonance of being told to “go back” to a place she barely knows how to claim. The film explores cultural alienation, intersectionality, political awakening and at its core, it is a story about reclaiming identity in a world that profits from disconnection.

Director’s Statement

This film draws directly from my experience as a second-generation Lebanese-Syrian woman growing up in Britain and the journey I’m currently on exploring my relationship to my heritage, nationality, language, body, geography, and sense of self.

At its centre is a simple question: what does it mean to want to reconnect with a culture you were never fully taught how to embody? For Mina, an interest in belly dancing becomes less about dance itself and more about permission - permission to explore a heritage she feels deeply connected to yet distanced from.

The film explores the tension of growing up between identities: being proud of where you come from while learning to minimise parts of yourself in order to assimilate. It is also a film deeply rooted in the current climate of rising nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and Britain’s entanglement in global violence.

Ultimately, this film is about refusing inherited silences. As a filmmaker, I am interested in creating work that interrogates dominant narratives while making space for the messy, political, deeply human realities that exist beneath them. In telling this story, I want to transform disconnection into recognition, and recognition into something that can move us toward solidarity, curiosity, and change

WHY WE CREATED MEMENTO PICTURES

As young filmmakers who entered the industry without financial privilege, established networks, or traditional pathways into film, Memento was born from a shared frustration with how inaccessible filmmaking is. Too often, opportunities are dependent on who you know, what you can afford, or how long you can survive working for free.

In similar situations to ourselves, we met countless talented creatives who were passionate, ambitious, and capable, but who lacked access to opportunities, equipment, mentorship, or simply the confidence to believe they belonged within the industry.

After noticing a huge trend in indie filmmaking for crews to be predominantly male and predominantly white, Memento is changing these statistics one project at a time.

What began as two young women making films with friends has grown into a network of screenings, productions, workshops, fundraisers, and creative events connecting thousands of under-represented young creatives both online and in person.

Across our productions, we actively prioritise opportunities for first-time filmmakers, young creatives from underrepresented backgrounds, and people who may not have traditional pathways into the industry. As a result of the company’s reception (our latest cast/crew calls got over 200,000 views on social media, we’ve managed to create a database of over 600 creatives who want to be a part of Memento’s community).

For us, this project is not simply about making films, it’s about cultivating the kinds of creative spaces we struggled to find when we first entered filmmaking ourselves.

WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP

Over the past two years, we’ve independently produced more than 10 mirco-budget short films - some of which have been selected for BAFTA-qualifying and BIFA-qualifying festivals - while building a rapidly growing creative community for emerging filmmakers across Scotland. We also have garnered a social media following of over 45,000 people across platforms that are invested in Memento and the stories we want to tell. 

Because of what we have achieved with little- to- no resources, the creatives we’ve brought together, and the people who are invested in our journey, we want to level up and start making more ambitious projects with bigger budgets.

Memento Summer is our biggest project yet, and raising £12,000 to do it will be difficult, but we think it is a necessary step in order to continue contributing to the Scottish indie filmmaking community.

Across Scotland and the wider UK, emerging artists are facing shrinking funding opportunities, rising production costs, and an industry culture that increasingly excludes those without financial stability or existing connections. Many young creatives are forced to leave the industry entirely before they are ever given the opportunity to properly enter it.

Which brings us here.

Memento Summer is our attempt to push back against that reality by creating ambitious work while opening doors for emerging filmmakers who might otherwise be excluded from the industry or haven’t yet been given a chance to start.

WHAT YOUR DONATION WILL PAY FOR

For us to bring Memento Summer to life, we’re estimating that the project will cost approximately £12,000 at a baseline level. We have already raised £1,000, but decided that a Crowdfunder was necessary to properly support the time and effort put into the films. For example, enabling us to pay our cast and crew higher wages, ensuring access to better resources and equipment and also giving us reassurance by having a bigger contingency pot. 

The money raised through this crowdfunder will also support the wider community events programme surrounding Memento Summer.

For now, here’s how the budget is broken down:

Film production is expensive, even at an emerging level, and the majority of our budget will go directly toward production costs. This covers everything required to physically make the films happen: paying crew and cast fairly, camera and lighting equipment, production design, costumes, locations, transport, catering, and insurance.

A significant portion of the budget will also go toward post-production. This includes editing, sound design, colour grading, VFX, score composition - anything really needed for us to complete the films. 

The sections that will cost the least will be our pre-production and distribution stages. Pre-production is the logistics and paperwork focussed phase, where we’ll need to secure our locations, any filming permits and insurance policies, which all require fees to be paid. Distribution will be funnelled into the development of our EPK (Electronic Press Kit), print marketing, community events, and lastly, our submission costs to UK and international film festivals.

MEET THE TEAM

Noor Kabbani is a Mancunian filmmaker and writer, originally from Lebanon and Syria. She co-founded Memento Pictures in 2023 with Ella and has since wrote and directed three films and produced around ten, one of which, Beyond The Bomb, has been selected for numerous BAFTA and BIFA- qualifying film festivals this year.

Noor writes and produces across multiple mediums, such as film, theatre, fiction, and spoken word. Her first look into producing was assistant producing The Counterminer’s critically acclaimed play Lost and Found at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023. To hone her producing and logistical skills, Noor is currently working in HETV on Series 2 of Department Q as a Production Assistant, after her Production Traineeship on ITV’s The Dark. She’s excited to continue building a career in HETV alongside producing for Memento Pictures. 

On the more creative side, in 2024 Noor was longlisted for the Channel 4 New Writers Scheme, was selected for the highly competitive National Youth Theatre summer intake programme, and was a Young Playwright for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. More recently, Noor took part in the Sean Connery Youth Talent Lab as a Writer/Director and took part in NFTS’ Underrepresented Writers Lab to begin developing a TV show pilot and pitch. 

As a filmmaker and writer, Noor is hungry to challenge and question the world we live in today. She is interested in genre, form, and medium-blurring films as a way to catalyse an exploration of complexity and refuse categorisation. She is most interested in the intersection between social-realism, comedy, dystopia, and absurdism to destabilise dominant narratives and create cinematic worlds where complexity, contradiction, and resistance can coexist.Through O Country! My Country! Noor wants to challenge narratives of shame, nationalism, and assimilation by creating a bold exploration of identity, cultural reclamation, and belonging. 

Ella Novie is a Los Angeles-born filmmaker based in Edinburgh and a co-founder of Memento Pictures, where she has produced more than 10 independent short films across narrative, documentary, experimental, and fashion filmmaking contexts.

Working across film, theatre, and live events, Ella’s practice is deeply multidisciplinary, with a particular interest in stories exploring girlhood, identity, performance, and the psychological pressures of growing up within a digital culture increasingly shaped by surveillance, perfectionism, and artificial beauty standards.

Alongside her independent work, Ella has gained experience across professional, independent, and student productions in roles spanning directing, producing, assistant directing, set running, and production coordination. She has worked with organisations and productions including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, St. Denis Medical, and The Napa Boys.

Beyond filmmaking, Ella served as the Creative Director of the Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show, Scotland’s largest student-run charity fashion show, helping raise more than £16,000 for charity through large-scale editorial productions and live runway events. She was also President of the University of Edinburgh Filmmaking Society.

As a filmmaker, Ella is particularly drawn toward psychological horror, folklore, surrealism, and experimental storytelling. Through “Sugarcoated”, she hopes to explore the invisible pressures shaping contemporary girlhood while creating emotionally honest work that challenges traditional expectations surrounding femininity, performance, and narrative form.

For Noor and Ella, Memento Pictures is not simply a production company. It is a long-term effort to create the kind of filmmaking culture they wished existed when they first entered the industry themselves: collaborative rather than competitive, accessible rather than gatekept, and rooted in genuine community rather than exclusivity.

Thank you in advance for your support. 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 20th August 2026 at 9:20am