Dawnbreaker | science and belief and religion mix in Elinor Lower debut

Sunrise, sunset. And just because the sun rose today, doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow. In new short Dawnbreaker, the responsibility of that daily cycle is being passed on, which is a pretty enlightening responsibility. Fittingly, the idea rose from a challenge that was defined by two sunrises.

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First-time director Elinor Lower and team (ratbird, since you ask) were part of the Two Short Nights 48-Hour Film Challenge, picking up Best 48-Hour Film in 2025 for their creation Dead Wife Hug. They were hooked, followed up by applying for an Exeter Phoenix Short Film Commission, and bagged one.

Magic and scepticism

Away from the prescription of the challenge, the team put their heads together and combined their interest in magic, scepticism and experience of years of working with children and young people in multi-art contexts, and came up with a collision of interests. What emerged was a combination of science and belief and religion as a nexus to explore ideas. Central was the question: what does it mean to have a fundamental belief – what does it do to us?

“I am really interested in the ways in which ideas are challenged or not challenged, the questions that we do or don’t ask ourselves about the things that are staples of our everyday lives,” Eli tells D&CFilm. “What happens when those big ideas meet a brain that is still growing and is still questioning, and does not have a lifetime’s worth of assumptions.”

A sceptical child

Dawnbreaker sees post-menopausal recluse Gill in the process of passing on her life’s work, ensuring the sun rises and sets, so the world doesn’t end, to a sceptical child.

With a career in theatre for Eli, their first foray into film saw a lot of learning on the fly. “The process is quick-fire,” says Eli. “I needed to make decisions earlier than I would do if I was making a play.” For the shoot, time constraints were also in place for how long they had the crew, as well as the restrictions of working with an 11-year-old.

“For theatre, often when you’re rehearsing a show, you have six weeks and you look at it from all angles – it’s much more iterative,” says Eli.

The idea went on a journey

Even with those restrictions, the idea went on a journey – ideas emerged and evolved in different ways than Eli was expecting. It was a creative evolution. “I was a completely different filmmaker at that point to the filmmaker I think I am now. And I’m sure that’s very different from the filmmaker I’ll be next year.”

There was some filmmaking experience in the team, but there was a network of people who were really just giving film a go for the first time, from development to filming, through the editing process, and to sound design. It’s a step that has opened creative doors. Eli is now on BFI New Voices, a BFI network scheme for screenwriters.

Paced and poetic

Eli is drawn to paced and slightly poetic filmmaking, but so far feels Dawnbreaker has an element of theatre to it.

“Character. That’s where I feel really comfortable,” they say. “There is a theatricality to Dawnbreaker. That may fade as my confidence as a visual storyteller grows. I have a real interest in the poignancy of the gaps between what’s not said, which emerged over the edit.”

This is part of Eli experimenting and pushing at their creative boundaries.

“I’m a maker that learns by doing, and I learn by setting myself an incredibly uphill battle, and then going, ‘can we get there?’” That was certainly the case with the ambition of Dawnbreaker, where they had to find cinematographic solutions to the script’s visual demands, combined with its logistical realities.

Creative cross-pollination

And just as Eli took their experience into film, it’s a creative cross-pollination between the mediums. One aspect they’ll be taking back to theatre is, “what needs to be said and what doesn’t. What can be done through visuals.” Eli also talks about trusting the audience, about leaving space and ambiguity – not trying to tell everybody everything.

The visuals were part of that storytelling, using light and thinking about spaces without people in. As references, they were taking Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. There was also the vaguely anachronistic collision of the modern with the old, as in Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. The way Eli describes that feel is “stripey sports socks next to something that feels old and majestic: it is happening now. It’s also kind of happening 100 years ago. And it’s sort of happening 100 years in the future.”

A crucible of learning

One of the joys was being on set, and seeing how the monitor would reflect the hard work, vision and magic. “It’s really been a crucible of learning,” says Eli. “The biggest challenge was reconciling what we knew and what we didn’t know. When to ask questions, and when to just back ourselves, particularly because we had a lot of women and non-binary people on set, that sense of confidence in your creative instincts sometimes doesn’t necessarily come.”

Throughout that process, the support of the Exeter Phoenix was vital in easing that transition into a different medium. There are already vague ideas of making their next film. But what inspired that transition from experienced theatre-maker to new filmmaker?

It is simply a combo of creative drive and opportunity. Eli says: “I had decided when I was 29 that I was going to make a film before I turned 30. It was January, and my birthday is in February.”

Dawnbreaker is an Exeter Phoenix commission, and premieres at Two Short Nights film festival on Friday 6 March.