Beloved music icon, Brit Award winner, Grammy nominee and now … award-winning film director.
Kate Bush has set out her stalls as a filmmaker by winning a prize for her directorial debut.
The “Wuthering Heights” legend won the animation award on Thursday for her anti-war short film “Little Shrew” at the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Wales, which also happens to be a BAFTA-qualifying event.
The film — inspired by the war in Ukraine — is set to Bush’s song “Snowflake” from her 2011 album “Fifty Words for Snow” and features a small mammal searching for hope as she makes her way across a bombed-out city.
“How wonderful! ‘Little Shrew’ is incredibly excited that she’s been awarded such a huge honour,” said Bush. “Thank you so very much from her, myself and all the team. We are over the moon!”
Bush wrote and directed the animated black-and-white film, storyboarded from her own sketches and illustrations by Jim Kay, to help raise money for children impacted by war via the charity War Child.
The singer recently enjoyed a huge resurgence when her song “Running Up That Hill” was featured in Season 4 of Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” reaching number one in the U.K. and several other countries, making Bush the oldest female artist to achieve a U.K. number one. The song went on to surpass 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, over fifty years since Bush signed her first record deal.
Other winners at the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival included Anthony D’Ambrosio’s “Triumph of the Heart,” which took the Feature Film prize, while Aaron Wheeler’s “The Edge of Existence” claimed the Feature Documentary award. Ian Puleston-Davies earned the Short Film Made in Wales honour for “Box of Frogs” and the Rising Star Award went to Isaac Thornton and Danny Taylor for “The Cards We’re Dealt.”
”What an incredible year it has been for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival,” said festival creative prroducer Stifyn Parri. “This year’s success has been beyond anything I could have imagined—most notably because a lifelong inspiration of mine, Kate Bush, shared her remarkable work with us by entering her film.”
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