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Simone Smith is an impassioned self-taught Filmmaker and Visual Artist from Glasgow, Scotland. And founder of WILD ROOM - an experimental production house of film, music video, art and experimental shows. Predominantly a one-woman production unit, Smith has quickly developed a style that has been described as "surreal poetry", and "raw and unconventional". She wants to tell emotionally conscious stories that explore a range of themes including transformation, vulnerability, and the challenges of becoming. She wants to get inside the heads of flawed, damaged human beings, and explore multidimensional emotional relationships. Her aesthetic is visceral and intense, balancing a raw and gritty realism with surreal, psychedelic visions of the world. 

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Her work has screened across publications, television and BAFTA and Oscar qualifying film festivals including Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Underwire, London Short Film Festival, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Cork Film Festival, Cinequest, MTV, NME and Channel 4. She has garnered awards and nominations including winning a BAFTA New Talent Award in 2013 for her short film RED - praised as "Very original" by Stanley Kubrick's producer, Jan Harlen, and "a true work of art" by Ain't It Cool News.

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In 2014 her short film THE RINSING starring BAFTA winning actress Daniela Nardini was broadcast on Channel 4's Random Acts and won the Best Film award at London's Shorts On Tap. It was also nominated for Best Experimental Short at Aesthetica Short Film Festival. In 2016 Simone was selected to attend Arteles' 'Silence Awareness Existence' residency in Finland where she began writing her first feature film UNTIL SHE BLEEDS. 

 

In 2018 Her latest short film SLAP was BAFTA nominated for Best Short Film, and won the Audience Award for best short film at Southside Film Festival in Glasgow. In 2019 it won the Jury Special Mention award at the Glasgow Short Film Festival were "the Jury were struck by the work of this director who is pursuing her own sensory style in design and narration." SLAP was also hailed by BFI's Sight and Sound Magazine -"Particularly bracing was Simone Smith’s Slap, an overwhelming, multi-sensory short about the intense terror of the school playground." SLAP was also praised by Glasgow's Blueprint curator Hans Lucas  - "The film's true success lays in its dazzling, idiosyncratic and kinetic form and style, which unleashes a rarely experienced kind of cinematic energy. It is a film which, genuinely, could be described as original and unforgettable." 

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Smith was raised in the east-end of Glasgow and gained a BA Honours in Computer Animation & Digital Art, an HND in Digital Art & Design, and an Advanced Diploma in Physical Theatre Practice. From 2008-2014 she earned a position at BBC Scotland, working up the ladder from Runner to self-shooting Director and Producer. Smith then travelled to New York to work with experimental theatre collective The Wooster Group. She is an EIFF Talent Lab participant for 2019 and is currently writing her first feature film UNTIL SHE BLEEDS  which is in-development with the Scottish Film Talent Network.

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