Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Gabrielle Russell
Senior Lecturer
Gabrielle is a fiction screenwriter and director who teaches on the BA FILMMAKING at the Northern Film School. She holds a first class degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds. She began making films as an artist and feminist interested in challenging representations of women, and began making fiction films focussing on female characters. She has written and directed a portfolio of award winning short films which have screened internationally at film festivals and broadcast worldwide.
Gabrielle completed her MA in Fiction Directing at the National Film and Television School. She is currently in Post Production on her first feature Deer Woman Child which she wrote and directed as part of her PHD by Creative Practice at the University of York, and in collaboration with staff and students at the Northern Film School. Her second feature film is currently in development The Reckoning of Erin Morrigan which she plans to take into production in 2022.
Areas of Expertise:
- Screenwriting
- Fiction Directing
- Feminist Theory
Current Teaching
Gabrielle teaches on the BA Filmmaking course at the Northern Film School where she is module leader of the FILMMAKING (Drama Production module) and Level 5 Year Leader.
Research Interests
Gabrielle makes very intimate films, dramas that communicate the secret thoughts, hopes and dreams of characters, reveal their inner life, even things that characters are in denial about and cannot face themselves. She tries to express psychological patterns and social values and give full expression to the way characters see the world so the audience can see and hear the world through someone else’s eyes.
This can be a visceral and moving vicarious experience. Audiences can identify with characters completely different to themselves and walk a mile in their shoes. In this way, film can build bridges between opposing points of view and show the value of other ways of thinking. It can create empathy and encourage understanding.
Time can be free. It can be compressed to show a story spanning many life-times or expanded to fully express a single moment. It can be non-linear, dreamlike, move backward and forward with playful story logic, or be structured in a particular way to create a poetic meaning.
Stories can be told by details, shifts in weather, the emotional power of a thought, or the magical power of an object. Films can make magic: animals can speak, mountains can move; metaphysical rules can be broken.
Gabrielle wants to make feature films because she is interested in telling stories that try to express our experience of consciousness. Film works in an audio visual way that allows fullest expression of sensory and psychological experience. So for her, film is the closest she can get to showing what a character is really thinking and feeling, what it is to be human.
Selected Outputs
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Russell G; Torenbeek L; Akinsehinwa T; Wyatt S; McClean M; Sankovitch M; Lavin D; Chen H; Fouere O; Doyle J (2024) THE RECKONING OF ERIN MORRIGAN.
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Russell G; Torenbeek L; Akinsehinwa T; Lia H; Steven W (2022) DEER WOMAN CHILD.
