Grace Harper Brighouse On Bringing Her Camden Film Festival-Winning Doc ‘Dependence’ Back Home To London — LFF

The 2026 London Film Festival rolls into action this week. And among the headline international galas, there is once again a strong collection of homegrown titles. The most exciting is perhaps Dependence, a moving, formally experimental documentary directed by debut filmmaker Grace Harper Brighouse.

Dependence premiered earlier this year at Camden, where it won the festival’s Harrell Award. The film examines the filmmaker’s strained relationship with her father, an estrangement caused by his OxyContin addiction, using a collection of home movies she shot as a young adult in film school.

“It was in 2013. I was making my first film at film school, about a strip pub in High Wycombe. I was having the best time,” Brighouse explains. “But I was very aware that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have enough time to make the film the way I wanted.”

Brighouse says her brother suggested returning home to make a film about their dad and his dying dog, Charlie.

“Every year, if my dad and I hadn’t been speaking, he would say, ‘Charlie’s going to die. He’s never going to make it through the winter.’ It gave us both an off-ramp: we could be together without having to apologise to each other for whatever the reason was that we weren’t speaking,” she says.

“So I came back. I’d been watching a lot of Russian documentaries, and I was really enjoying the smoke, the framing, and the very pretentious, arthouse documentary shots that I still love so much. But I realised that it had been quite a long time. I guess this is what a camera does: it lets you observe things that you don’t usually observe, particularly in your closest relationships.”

Brighouse’s father died, and the footage sat dormant for many years.

“I logged and backed up the footage onto about twelve hard drives,” Brighouse says.

“I couldn’t really watch it for a very long time. A dear friend of mine, Eleanor Mortimer, logged it for me so I could look at it without having to watch it. It was such a gift because I couldn’t do it myself.”

Brighouse says she later felt an unexplainable urge to return to the material.

“I would look at it and think, ‘Okay, what was here? Let me look at this.’ Slowly, I understood that I wasn’t done with that film, but it wasn’t the film I was making anymore,” she says. “So, what had it become?”

The Camden programmers described Dependence as “a funny, tender, and poignant essay on family bonds.” Indeed, Dependence is a thoughtful exploration of addiction and the unique power of paternal love.

The film has a breezy construction. There are time jumps, and images are presented in multiple formats. Brighouse also avoids talking heads or any of the visual tropes we’ve come to associate with films about families and addiction. She cites RaMell Ross’s wonderfully transgressive Hale County This Morning, This Evening as an influence.

“That film unlocked a way for me to think about storytelling and time, and about creating a visual language that is different from the guidebook,” Brighouse says.

Brighouse is credited as the director and cinematographer on Dependence. There is additional cinematography by Roger Chapman, Ronnie McQuillan, and Tom Besley. Vera Simmonds was the editor, and the film was produced by Caitlin Mae Burke and Alistair Payne-James (140 Films). Brighouse describes a scrappy production.

“We had to get to a rough cut by scraping together very little money through artist residencies and paid time. Everyone had other jobs while doing it,” she says, adding that she hopes the film can find and engage with a large audience.

“I hope we’ve made something where, in the end, you think, ‘I really just want to talk to my family member and tell them I love them,’” Brighouse says. “That sounds trite, but I hope the film can sit in that space of complex, messy familial love, as well as all the issues it touches on.”

140 Films is heading sales on the project. The film screens Sunday, October 11th, at the LFF.