In 2012, Mark Jenkin wrote his self-proclaimed manifesto “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13,” a series of vows of chastity à la Dogme 95; among other strictures, the Cornish director promised to shoot his films in black-and-white, keep them under 80 minutes and use only natural or available light, post-synched sound and diegetic music. Only a handful of projects Jenkin’s made since then would meet all those criteria. But even as his productions have steadily gotten bigger after his BAFTA-winning 2019 breakthrough Bait, his filmmaking approach hasn’t drastically changed. Jenkin wears many hats—aside from writing and directing, he routinely edits and shoots his own films. As cinematographer, he works with antiquated cameras, photographing his last three features on a clockwork Bolex H16 with a maximum runtime of 28 seconds per take, and likes to hand-process his films himself, as he did for the stupefying 2015 short Bronco’s House and again in Bait. Flashes, marks and splotches crop up everywhere on his frames, but to call those aberrations would be to miss the point. The scratchiness is neither a gimmick nor a mistake. Cornwall’s rampant depopulation over rising costs and unchecked tourism has long been one of Jenkin’s crucial thematic preoccupations; his films often register as tributes to lifestyles and communities on the brink of extinction. In this sense, the worn-out visuals dovetail with the dilapidated settings, playing like weathered artefacts washed ashore from raging seas. At the same time, every imperfection suggests an openness to the unexpected that imbues his cinema with an astonishing vitality. To venture into it is to wade into uncharted waters, and the feeling is nothing short of electrifying.

Rose of Nevada follows in its predecessors’ footsteps, which is to say it unfurls as another ghost story. When the titular fishing boat magically reappears in the harbor of some unnamed Cornish village—thirty years since it vanished at sea with all hands—the old owner recruits a three-man crew to ship it back out in hopes to bring new luck to the spectrally empty town. Steering the Rose of Nevada is grizzled skipper Murgey (Francis Magee), and working the nets and gutting the fish are two young deckhands: Nick (George MacKay) enlists to provide for wife and child, laconic drifter Liam (Callum Turner) joins to escape his past. But no sooner does the boat return after the first successful trip that Nick realizes the journey has brought them back in time, and the hamlet welcomes them as if they were the original crew. From here on, Rose of Nevada becomes a psychodrama in the vein of Jenkin’s folk horror Enys Men (2022). As Liam happily adjusts to the new circumstances, Nick—the only one aboard the Rose who seems bothered by the time warp—succumbs to an existential panic.

MacKay and Turner are the two biggest actors to enter Jenkin’s cinematic universe, but the presence of renowned stars doesn’t substantially alter the director’s M.O. Jenkin likes to yank your attention sideways, away from his solitary wanderers and toward to the physical world that surrounds them. Objects are key, as the action is punctuated with cutaway shots of quotidian, unassuming items: a mug, a rusty anchor, a pair of boots. You might be tempted to cling on to them as temporal markers, but Jenkin’s films have a way of jamming your bearings. Even when technically set in the present—as is Rose of Nevada’s first act—they still seem to unspool in some undetermined past. An old poster, some cassettes, and a tape player in Nick’s room suggest the early 1990s long before we rewind to that decade. And while Rose of Nevada might be considerably more polished than some of its forebears—Jenkin shot it with his Bolex H16 but did not hand-process it—it still teems with scratches and red-light leak flashes. Where other filmmakers might turn to celluloid as an exercise in nostalgia, Jenkin embraces it out of a staunch belief in its ability to surprise. Rose of Nevada is no ancient relic, but a film testifying to the medium’s materiality and exuberance.

The day after Rose of Nevada premiered at Venice in the Horizons sidebar, I sat with Jenkin to discuss its genesis, his fascination for inanimate objects and his efforts to stay true to his DIY approach while working on his biggest production yet.
Rose of Nevada screens four times, beginning tomorrow, October 1, at the 2025 New York Film Festival.

Filmmaker: Ghosts and time travels have been a feature of your cinema long before Rose of Nevada. I was hoping we could start with your fascination with these temporal jumps.

Jenkin: It’s just a natural state of mind for me. I don’t think we exist in the present at all. The present is just a construct of everything we’ve been through and everything we imagine is going to happen. As time goes on, I’ve realized my concern for time and cinema are the same thing. To me, film is a way to make sense of the fact that maybe we’re the only beings on the planet conscious enough to be influenced by what’s happening in the past and what might happen in the future. I think the reason cinema had to be invented in the first place was to try and make sense of time and stop us from going mad. That’s why it’s humanity’s greatest achievement.

Filmmaker: Anytime I wander into your films I find it difficult to orient myself temporally, and Rose of Nevada is no different in that respect. How much of that disorientation owes to your production design?

Jenkin: Quite a lot. The production design in this film is very deliberate. Nick is supposed to have gone back to 1993; the nineties were my formative years, and I think I still live in that era. My cultural references, the music I listen to, my sense of fashion—they’re all from the mid-nineties. It’s an idealized period of my life. But as I started working with production designer Felicity Hickson, I realized my memories were wrong, because they’d been recorded over with pop culture representations of that period from now, as if all the men walked around looking like Ian Brown from The Stone Roses or Tim Burgess from the Charlatans. But if you consider what people really looked like in that period, especially in a place like Cornwall—not exactly the Haçienda in Manchester—we all still looked like we were in the eighties. Felicity showed me reference pictures, and I just couldn’t believe it. That’s the conscious representation we achieved through the production design, but I think the feeling is also heightened by the camera I worked with. We shot with three roughly identical cameras, all Bolex H16s. We would only have one shot with one camera at a time and would rotate them depending on what lenses I was using. I guess the newest camera we used was from 1976, the oldest probably 1961.

Filmmaker: Did you use the same clockwork cameras with which you shot Bronco’s House? With a maximum length of 28 seconds per take?

Jenkin: Bronco’s House, Bait, and Enys Men. Same camera, yeah. Which doesn’t exactly help you date the look of the film to 1993—if anything, it suggests some earlier decade. But it’s an aesthetic that can’t date, ‘cause it’s already dated. A film shot on 16mm Vision3 color negative is just frozen in time, whereas something that’s shot on a digital format maybe ten years ago… Look, this isn’t an anti-digital rant, and I’m not suggesting those things age badly. But if you look at early digital films from 2005 or 2006, they look so weird now, whereas my films won’t get any older than they look. And the production design was key. Sure, I could have graded or shot the two timelines differently, so that the present-day sections in Rose of Nevada would be easy to distinguish from the bits set in the past, but I didn’t want to do that. That dislocation was all in the production design. My ideal response from a viewer is for them to go, “I don’t know what year this is.”

Filmmaker: I like to think that your films are as interested in their characters as they are in the objects that surround them. As a viewer, I often feel as though my attention is redirected to the nonfictional background. Hence all those cutaway shots of mugs, books, some chairs and boots…

Jenkin: The boots are my foot fetish! [laughs] Somebody told me at the screening yesterday, “No wonder Tarantino is interested in your work!” But mine’s footwear fetish. I don’t think there are bare feet in any of my films.

Filmmaker: But what draws you to all these inanimate objects?

Jenkin: Well, I want the audience to work out meanings. I don’t want them to sit like this [slouches on his chair], but to sit forward like that [clutches the edge of the seat]. Some might not be prepared to do that, and that’s fine. They’ll disregard the film and wonder, “What’s this? Why am I looking at shoes and mugs?” But I want to suggest that there might be some significance to these shots, and it’s for you to find out. Maybe you won’t draw the same conclusions I will, maybe there’ll only be minor and fairly insignificant connections, but it’s a way of getting the audience to engage.

It comes down to two different things, really. One’s the way I work. I shoot on hundred-foot rolls of film and load the film myself. A few feet at beginning and the end of the roll may be fogged; I don’t want to shoot anything essential on them, but I don’t wanna waste them either. Say I was filming our chat right now. I might have to change the roll halfway through. I won’t want to use the first few feet at the beginning of the new roll for your next line of dialogue, just ‘cause it might not come out right. So, I might quickly grab a shot of your phone on the table and forget about it. Then, at the end of the roll, I’d point the camera out there [points at the window] and get a shot of the trees. When I get into the edit, I’ll be cutting the scene of the two actors talking and might slow it down a little bit. There’s a closeup where you glance at the window, and I’ll think, “Oh, well, I’ve got that shot of the trees…” If I cut that into a dialogue scene where we’re talking quite intensely, and suddenly you look away and we cut to a shot of the trees and then back to me, the viewer might draw some meaning from the juxtaposition: this person’s not totally engaged in the conversation, their mind’s wandering. Or, I could use the shot of the phone instead. There might be a moment where my character sort of looks down, very briefly, and we cut to this shot of the phone, so the audience might feel as if I was waiting for a call. Those things might not work; they might be completely incongruous. But sometimes you get these moments where you realize a scene has just gone [mimics explosion] because of those accidents, effectively. That’s an example of form dictating content.

I remember somebody in the States during a Q&A for Enys Men said I give the impression that my films are made entirely by accident… [chuckles] I don’t see it like that. Editing is exactly the same as the writing process for me. Writing is editing with imagined footage, and editing is editing with actual footage. That’s why I end up focusing so much on these objects. Often I’ll walk on set and study the objects the set dresser might have imagined would be out of focus and placed in the background, and I’ll go, “Let’s put that here so I can get a shot of it, ’cause there might be a bit of meaning here…” I think it’s because of the way I work with film. Everything’s so valuable—I don’t mean monetarily, but ’cause I don’t shoot much. Everything I do shoot is very valuable to me. That’s what’s on my mind when I walk on a set; one way or another I’ll try to feature every little thing that’s in there. And that means quite often I will film inanimate objects, which will only gain meaning once they’re juxtaposed to something else in the edit.

It’s also a psychological thing. Sometimes I need a moment by myself to have a think. If I’m on a busy set, I’ll just say, “I’m just gonna get some cutaways!” I might just be two meters away from everybody else but I won’t be answering questions; sometimes I’ll set up a shot and won’t even film it. I’ll just pretend I’m doing something so I can have a moment. But often, if I do run the camera, those shots become really key and will help me out in the edit, because I don’t shoot any coverage, any masters that I can rely on. I might miss a shot that covers a person getting from here to there, so I can cut away to an inanimate object, put the sound of feet over it, then cut back. That’s how I end up with a lot of cutaways, and how I’ve fallen into shooting feet as well. First rule at film school in terms of editing was: “Always shoot feet, they’ll cover you.” But as I was doing that, I realized that people were reading meaning into these shots. In Bait, Mary [Woodvine’s] character, the second homeowner, has these very dainty shoes, while Edward [Rowe], who plays the fisherman, wears working boots. Suddenly you can say something very clear about their two different worlds without getting bogged down with the ambiguity of facial expressions. It’s very like, [taps the table] bang, bang, bang!

One of my favorite sequences in Rose of Nevada is where I tried to capture the idea that George MacKay and Mae Voogd’s characters were a couple who were still in love—not just a family or the parents of a young child. He’s done with the washing up and steps out of the kitchen and sees her and the child drawing. I couldn’t leave it at that; you might have gotten the idea that they were a loving family, but it was still too much about the child. I wanted to show you he was still lusting after his partner. And the way to do that, I thought, was to put a cutaway of her neck—not her face, just her neck. The wide shot does one thing, but a closeup of her neck suggests an intimacy that you wouldn’t even get from looking into her eyes, because then you’d be seeing her own thoughts. That’s the power of film editing, and why I want to keep making movies.

Filmmaker: It isn’t just feet though. The insistence with which Rose of Nevada lingers on shots of hands brought me back to Robert Bresson, and I remember you listing L’Argent (1983) as one of your key touchstones. I’d be curious to hear if his approach to filming actors might have influenced your own—I’m thinking of the statuesque stillness your characters evoke as you frame them standing and staring into space.

Jenkin: L’Argent is probably my favorite movie of all time; I think it’s Bresson at his purest. I wouldn’t go that far with the analogy though, because formally my filmmaking doesn’t really resemble his. I think he’d probably hate my films. They would be too cutty for him, too tricksy in how they portray time. But that’s the reason why I try and shoot everything on a single lens. Bresson shot everything on a 50mm lens with a 35mm camera; I shoot everything on a 26mm lens with a 16mm camera. That’s approximately the same focal length. I try not to move the camera unless I absolutely have to, and I don’t work with a focus puller. That’s why my characters didn’t move initially; I just didn’t pull focus. Because the camera’s totally manual, I would need three hands to be able to run the camera, move the tripod head and pull focus. In Rose of Nevada, there’s a shot where George’s character comes down the stairs, walks around to the door and picks up the letter that he’s tried to send back home but has come back through his own door. That shot has a tilt, a pan and a pull focus. That’s the equivalent of the opening of Goodfellas to me! [laughs] It’s like the greatest shot I’ve ever done—and I did it first take as well. I didn’t know whether I’d got it until we received the rushes back two days later. I couldn’t see the focus in the viewfinder.

The formal restrictions of the camera have led me to embrace that stillness within performances, which I’ve come to really love. But also, when I started working with them, Ed, Mary and the others were all theatre people used to expressing themselves physically on the stage. So when I put ’em in front of the camera, I said, “Right, you can’t move nothing.” We’d do a rehearsal, a hand would go up and I’d say, “No, I want hands down. If I want hands, I’ll do a closeup of a hand.” Obviously they got it, and quite often the footage we’d record was without dialogue anyway. Suddenly you get that stillness; all your focus goes to their eyes, and you realize that even when they’re doing nothing, they’re still communicating so much with their faces.

Filmmaker: I read again your “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13” manifesto before the film’s premiere, and I think Rose of Nevada breaks all the rules you’d laid out there. It made me wonder if you see a tension between your commitment to a certain type of cinema—DIY, analog, small-scale—and the expectations that come from what was presumably a much bigger budget.

Jenkin: To tell you the truth, my first thought when we talked about budget was, “What the hell are we gonna spend this money on?” Obviously I didn’t say that in any meetings with execs, ’cause I didn’t want to talk us out of having a bigger budget. But I was able to entirely preserve the way I work. I didn’t think I’d be allowed, and I fell into the trap of self-censoring, initially. I remember saying in an early meeting, “Well, obviously I’m gonna have to record location sound and have a director of photography and operator.” And everybody in the room went: “No. Why?” I thought that I’d have to make changes based on what I thought other people would require me to do, but the people who want to work with me want that because my method is different. And from that moment on, I was able to really preserve the way I work. The camera crew was the same size as usual: it was me, a first AC and a second AC. That was it. I was my own loader, my own focus puller—on that one shot in the film that’s got a focus pull… [chuckles]

Filmmaker: Was Rose of Nevada hand-processed, too?

Jenkin: No, Bait and Bronco’s House were. I haven’t hand-processed a color feature film yet. It’s just too difficult, because the chemistry must be kept at 37 degrees, and it would require a lot of rushes. Black-and-white is relatively easier. But yes, we used the same film stock, the same camera, same lack of a sound department, same personnel roughly, same tripod and same bean bag that I screw into the bottom of the camera to be able to put it anywhere and keep it static. That bean bag died last week on another shoot; I had it for over 30 years. Where the budget went is something you should ask the producer, but if you’re doing a bigger film, you obviously must do it in a slightly different way—legally speaking, too. And the size of the crew changed a lot. We went from working with 23 people on Enys Men to having 140 on this one, at times. We had a huge construction department, because the street where Nick lives had to be built, and they built in a day. We shot that on the last day of the shoot, and the actual construction started the day before we shot it. They brought in lots of people for that—our wrap picture was like a football crowd.

Filmmaker: Was it just as easy to wander off and shoot some things on your own as you did in previous projects?

Jenkin: Yeah. Because I’m the DOP and operator and always have the camera in my hand, I could walk down to the set with George and Callum and, if I saw something, take the bean bag out, put the camera on the ground and get my shot. I might have my assistant there with a reflector who could bounce a bit of light on the subject, but that’s about it. I can capture those details and moments, and I can shoot them in the same way that I would my diary short films that I make with a Super 8 camera. The opening sequences, all those cutaways of the dereliction around the harbor, were shots I recorded two days before picture lock. I walked down the hill from my studio, put a roll of film in the camera and filmed bits of my local harbor. It’s nowhere near where we ended up shooting, but I just really liked those textures.

Filmmaker: That reminds me of a moment in your 2023 short A Dog Called Discord when you say that what keeps you hooked to film is its sheer unpredictability. Shooting on celluloid, and then waiting for the rushes to come back, you never know what you’ll get.

Jenkin: That’s the beauty of capturing images. Time is always slipping by, and you might want to share it with people who are no longer around you—but the great privilege we have as filmmakers is that we get a chance to capture and preserve it. Hence my obsession with ghosts. Film is a medium of ghosts—you watch a film from forty years ago and while the whole cast might be dead in the real world there they are, brought back to life on the screen, and you’re watching these apparitions on a canvas. I don’t mean to romanticize things—it’s not like when I check the rushes in the morning before going to set I’m there going, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, cinema’s ability to capture time!” Usually I’m worrying about things that came out wrong. Only once I get to talk about the film do I realize the whole thing really is kind of amazing. Cinema is still only 130 years old, give or take, and in the fullness of time we might be thought of as the early pioneers of the medium. If we’re not still excited by cinema’s untapped potential, then we’re in trouble.

Filmmaker: Maybe that’s why your films never register as nostalgic. Sure, their aesthetic might make them look anachronistic when pitted next to much contemporary arthouse and commercial cinema, but I never looked at them as ancient relics.

Jenkin: And I should also clarify that I’m not totally analog! Come to think of it, I’m not analog at all, really, beyond capturing images in a photochemical process with a clockwork camera. Everything after that is digital. I digitally edit the sound; I use tape, but then I must digitize it. My audience exists in a digital world. I often communicate with people via Instagram. I try not to fetishize the analog side of it, and I’m not anti-digital either. When I started out, I imagined that the Q&As for films like Bait or Bronco’s Housewould be full of old blokes who’d turn up just to talk about shooting on film. As it happens, the old blokes who come to my screenings are those who at the end like to ask me why the hell I’m still bothering with film. They pull out their iPhones and go, “Do you know you can make films on these, too?” Of course they don’t actually know how to do that, and I don’t either. They’ve been told this is the future and bought that. Whereas younger people who were born with iPads and iPhones in their hands tend to find celluloid more exotic. It’s a slower process—you must wait for it—and it’s the alternative to what they’re used to. That’s why it becomes attractive. A lot of my viewers seem to be under 25, which is obviously great for me and my films, but also a testament to cinema’s vitality.