Arts / Best and brightest film-making talent celebrated at biggest HomeMade yet
LEGO zombies, claymation cats and a giant Yorkshire pudding – it could only be Shetland’s annual celebration of the best and brightest young film-makers, HomeMade.
The short film extravaganza stretched to include its largest field ever this year, with 33 films – all four minutes or shorter – gracing Mareel’s biggest screen on Saturday afternoon.
Now in its 17th year, as explained by spearheads Cara McDiarmid, Logan Nicolson and Kathy Hubbard at the start, HomeMade continues to expand and grow, while also at times defying expectations.
This year there were a range of awards to give out, with the audience voting for their favourites as usual and charity Shetland ForWirds celebrating the films that used Shaetlan to the best effect.
New for 2025 was a judges award, presented and selected by Robert Thomson, who joked that when he came up with the idea he had no designs on being the person who judged the competition.
However, he added, Hubbard had been “very persuasive” – and so he was left fretting over who to choose to take home the prizes.
In the end Thomson gave runners-up to young Tove Matthew for her claymation story Rocky and Flooer, which he compared favourably to the work of Aardman’s Nick Park, and to Christie Lewis Tulloch’s stop-motion Lego zombies tale.
That film had the audience in stitches when it transpired that the apparent cure for a zombie apocalypse is cups of tea and Jaffa Cakes.
The judges’ top prize went to Josiah Naquin for his Christianity-inspired A Matter of Faith.
Appropriately the audience was told Naquin was not in attendance to receive his award – because he had just started film school in Los Angeles.
Zombie Lego was a hit in the Shetland ForWirds categories too, winning the under-18s award.
The runner-up in the adult section for the dialect prizes was Stuart Hannay’s film about Elvis and the birds, inspired by the work of Seamus Heaney, with Islesburgh Photographic Club scooping the top award for its film Da Boat Biggir’s Nefjoo.
That film, a black-and-white interpretation of Robert Alan Jamieson’s poem of the same name, was also joint-second when it came to the audience’s votes.
It shared the prize with young film-makers Thea and Mallin Tallack’s Dear Ocean, an ode to the sea and their love for wild swimming.
But having taken home awards in the other two categories, it was only right that Christie Lewis Tulloch came back up to the Mareel stage to win the audience prize for Zombies – A Lego Stop-Motion.
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