FIRST LOOK: Naqqash Khalid’s ‘Flint’ starring Rory Fleck Byrne
By Natalia Albin Legorreta & Molly LipsonEXCLUSIVE: Here’s your first look at Naqqash Khalid’s third short film Flint.
The writer-director of In Camera, starring Nabhaan Rizwan, Rory Fleck Byrne and Amir El-Masry, was commissioned by the BBC to produce Flint for television. It is due for TV release in 2026 with its UK premiere taking place on 27th January 2026 at the London Short Film Festival.
Rory Fleck Byrne (Dope Girls, This is Going to Hurt) stars as Flint, a man returning to his childhood home and falling back into familiar routines and violence. The film also stars Theodore Boulton, Finbar Lynch, and Eileen Walsh.
“Flint started as a dream I had when making In Camera...” Khalid said in a director’s statement. “I was towards the end of production and had all these new textures and colours swirling around in my mind. Yellow. Meteor rocks. Sharp shards of metal and steel. The jaggedness of lava. Meat. A severed hand…. I was inspired by the work Rory and I were constructing on set. I remember waking in the middle of the night and writing down fragments from my dream; those became Flint. They didn’t belong to In Camera.”
“In a culture obsessed with endless growth, there’s sometimes a misconception that short films are just stepping stones or calling cards for features – I don’t see it that way. Films should be as long or as short as they need to be. I tried stretching FLINT into a feature once, almost as a test for myself. It resisted. It snapped back. After releasing IN CAMERA, I started thinking more deeply about the kind of work I wanted to make, the kind of artist I want to be. I needed to return to an innocence to give myself the space to reset, start again, and try new ways of working. What I needed most was to experiment. This is that experiment.”
