BACKSTORY

Simon Lord is a screenwriter based between London and Berlin. Born in London and raised in Paris, he is drawn to stories of underdogs, dreamers, odd couples, found families, makeshift communities, and the absurdity to be found even in profound and emotional stories.

His debut feature Jellyfish starred BAFTA nominees Liv Hill and Cyril Nri, and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, before winning Best Performance at Edinburgh and then sweeping the board at Dinard, winning Best Film, Best Screenplay, the Critics’ Award and a new Best Performance prize created for Liv by the Jury president, Monica Bellucci. The film received a UK theatrical release in February 2019, and was praised by Mark Kermode as “A terrific piece of work” and by the Financial Times as “funny, touching, vividly memorable” in a 5* review.

His joint-debut feature, road comedy Above The Clouds, went into production the same year, and played at Raindance in the UK and at the Austin Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and was acquired for worldwide VOD by Gravitas. In 2019 Simon’s short script On The Beaches, about Albert Einstein’s time on the run from the Nazis won the Pears Short Film Prize and was produced as a short film starring Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones, The Last Of Us). A feature on the same subject is currently in the casting process.

Simon has worked extensively with Braintrust Productions, including on book adaptation We Shall Be Herd, with Michael Caton-Jones (Our Ladies, Rob Roy) attached to direct, and TV drama Rabbit, co-written with the notorious AOK Simpson and also produced by Rienjke Attoh (Noughts and Crosses). With Cosmik Pictures, he is co-writing Jellyfish follow-ups Execution Dependent (a.k.a. Grans Gone Wild) to star Asa Butterfield, Penelope Wilton and Maxine Peake, and music-themed TV comedy Tributes, among other projects.

Simon has previously been selected for Edinburgh Film Festival’s Talent Lab (2015), Connections Mentoring Programme (2016), and Ideas Lab (2018), the latter leading to the development of The Hunger, a limited series telling a tale of heroic medical research carried out in secret by Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto.