How VFX graduate Morgana Steele went from Escape to the BFI

This spring, 2025 VFX Escapee Morgana Steele presented her short film, Reborn in BKK, at the BFI Flare festival less than a year after graduating. Read on to see how she approached an ambitious new project and brought it a wider audience. 

In November last year I graduated from Escape Studios with a BA in VFX and then, I flew to Thailand to begin work on a documentary about gender-affirming medical tourism. At the time, it felt like a threshold moment: the point at which the work I had been doing for clients and promoters started to give way to something riskier, more personal, and harder to contain within my usual lifestyle of freelance production. I had spent the  previous year covering live events and producing social content for a start-up music  promoter while freelancing on the side, but this project demanded a level of self-direction. 

During my time at Escape, I had tackled plenty of demanding projects, so thankfully I was already experienced in planning complex films. As well as learning new skills quickly to meet the needs of the project.

The shoot in Thailand did not unfold as planned. One of the documentary’s subjects developed complications soon after filming began, and the project was suddenly forced into a confrontation with its own limits. In practical terms, that meant stopping production and prioritising the person in front of me. In creative terms, it meant accepting that documentary-making is often defined less by what it captures than by what it must refuse to exploit. 

 While the filming didn’t go to plan, the whole experience was cinematic in its own way. Eclectic, life affirming, and complex, the sort of experience that tests not only your sense of self but your soul. There's no feeling in the world like riding at 150 miles an hour into the sunset on the back of a grab bike. And not being able to remember what you had for lunch. 

Then, in February, I got a call from Queerwell, the mental health charity, which had partnered with the BFI on a series of sessions and had taken an interest in the project.  I had experience pitching from my course, and I managed to use my silver tongue to secure my film a spot on the program without having anything close to a finished product. We agreed to present the work as part of BFI Flare.  

We completed production in March, shooting a combination of cinematic material to close out the narrative and social content to support the conversation around the screening. Again, this is where my onset experience really thrived - keeping a room of Extras, Cinematographers, Photographers, and Grips organised while also acting and directing is no easy feat. 

The London material was shot by Rio Redwood Sawyer on a RED Komodo-X with Leica primes. As a finished piece, the film sits somewhere between a very short documentary and a proof of concept for a larger work. The London filming was structured a lot like a music video, snappy attention-grabbing spectacle designed to give the project a strong visual identity. 

Our central challenge was structural as much as ethical: how to make the story feel coherent while also respecting one subject’s wish to step away from the project midway through production. What emerged was a film shaped as much by absence as by presence, with a figure who seems to hover just outside the frame. That absence is not simply a production problem; it is part of the film’s meaning. It speaks to the instability of authorship, to the pressure documentary places on real lives, and to the uncomfortable fact that not every intimate story becomes more truthful by being more visible. It is also, unavoidably, deeply autobiographical. 

I gave the talk at BFI Southbank in March. What might have felt intimidating instead turned out to be warm and unusually intimate; the room was full of friends, which made the event feel less like a formal industry platform and more like a temporary community gathering. Some of my Escape cohort also made it to the screening. I was interviewed by Activist and Influencer, Robyn Newark. 

The session combined a screening, an interview and a Q&A, and touched on many of the film’s central concerns: euphoria, mental health, and the value of a messy, lived-in narrative that resists neat resolution. So much discourse around trans life still demands clarity, uplift, or exemplary suffering; I am increasingly interested in work that refuses those terms. 

For now, the project remains in a state of suspension. The proof of concept was well received, but there are still clear limits on the narrative I can ethically pursue from here. That uncertainty is frustrating, though perhaps also clarifying. My hope is to secure funding to continue the work with a new subject, or to take it in a different direction altogether by exploring other facets of queer experience without forcing this particular film to become something it no longer wants to be. 

One of my favourite takeaways came from asking friends for feedback after screenings. Doll test audiences tended to describe the film as ‘fierce’. Other filmmakers called it ‘powerful’. Cis male viewers, meanwhile, often just winced. Which is a hilarious juxtaposition. 

This whole project felt like an interruption to my life, now that I’ve returned to usual scheduling; nightlife, photoshoots, and content creation. I feel more capable than ever, and more willing to take control of my own narrative. Often problematic conspiracy theorists use the term ‘escaping the matrix’ to be a call to action to accept a world view based on delusional paranoia and internalised reactionary beliefs. Which I think is quite tragic considering The Matrix was directed by The Wachowski sisters and seems to be a message of taking control of one’s fate and not being afraid to attempt the impossible. I believe that this whole project and the story of my early 20s as a whole has been to dare to do something ambitious and true to myself.  

Morgana studied BA (Hons)/MArt The Art of Visual Effects. Reborn in the BKK is available to watch now.