Thinking Ahead, Part 1: The Next Generation of Filmmakers
Thinking Ahead is a Horizon Collective editorial series exploring the ideas, tensions, and forces shaping the future of film, video, and creative storytelling.
This is Part 1. Part 2 - The Gatekeepers: Power, Principle, Responsibility and Openness in the Film, TV and Video Industry - publishes Friday 12 June.
There is a temptation, when talking about the next generation of filmmakers and content creators, to reach for a single defining quality. To say they are more empathic, or more digitally fluent, or more politically conscious, or more technically versatile, and to let that one quality stand for the whole. It is a tidy argument. It is also, we think, a reductive one.
The most interesting emerging filmmakers and creators should be able to resist easy categorisation. What they share is not a single attribute but a fundamentally different relationship with what filmmaking is - what it is for, who it belongs to, how it should be made, and what it owes the world it enters. That is a more complex thing to describe. But it is also a more honest account of what is actually changing in the industry, and why it matters.
Beyond the Single Story of a Generation
Every generation of creative practitioners gets flattened into a narrative by those observing them from the outside. The next generation of filmmakers is no different - they are variously described as screen-native, purpose-driven, multi-hyphenate, socially conscious, or entrepreneurially minded, depending on who is doing the describing and what they want the description to do.
Each of these observations contains something true. None of them captures the whole picture. And the habit of reducing a diverse, contested, internally contradictory generation of creative thinkers to a single defining characteristic does something quietly damaging - it turns the next generation into a type rather than a collection of distinct, broad individuals making work from their own specific perspectives and experiences.
So rather than offer another flattening portrait, we want to try something different: to identify the qualities and orientations we see in the most compelling emerging filmmakers.
A Different Relationship With Craft
The next generation did not grow up with a single received tradition of what filmmaking looks like. They grew up watching film and television alongside YouTube essays, short-form social content, documentary podcasts, video games with cinematic production values, and user-generated content that sometimes achieves things highly produced work cannot. This sense of what craft means is consequently broader and less hierarchical than previous generations.
This is not the same as saying they are less interested in craft. The opposite is often true. But they are less likely to accept a received hierarchy of formats, in which cinema sits at the top and social content at the bottom - as a natural or neutral ordering. They move between formats with a fluidity that can look like lack of commitment to those who value specialisation, but which more accurately reflects a genuine belief that the right form for any given story is the one that serves that story best, whatever it happens to be.
The question isn't "what format are you working in?" It's "what are you trying to make happen in someone, and what's the best way to make it happen?"
A Different Relationship With Technology
The next generation of filmmakers arrived into an industry in active technological transformation. They have not experienced the tools of filmmaking as stable, they have always known them to be provisional, contested, and rapidly changing. This produces a qualitatively different relationship with technology than previous generations had.
They are, in general, less reverent about any particular tool or workflow. They are more willing to reach for whatever technology serves the idea rather than defending the tools they learned on. And they are more alert to the questions technology raises - about labour, about authorship, about who benefits from automation and who is displaced by it, because those questions have been live throughout their professional formation, not introduced as disruptions to an established order.
This does not mean they are uncritical adopters of new tools. The most interesting emerging filmmakers often have a thoughtful and sometimes sceptical relationship with the technologies being enthusiastically promoted to them. They ask who builds these tools, who profits from them, and whose creative labour they are being positioned to replace. These are not obstacles to productive engagement with new technology, they are the markers of a sophisticated and genuinely independent creative intelligence.
A Different Relationship With Authorship and Collaboration
The romantic image of the singular auteur - the director as sole creative vision, the author as lone genius - has always been a partial fiction. Film has always been a collaborative medium. But the next generation is, in our experience, less invested in maintaining that fiction than their predecessors.
They are more likely to approach projects as genuinely collective endeavours, not just in the sense of working with a crew but in the deeper sense of understanding the creative contribution of every person involved. They are more likely to credit collaborators generously, to seek out perspectives and voices outside their immediate experience, and to treat the subjects of documentary work as participants in the creative process rather than material to be shaped.
This has practical implications for how they work, and for the kinds of work they produce. Content made with a genuinely collaborative orientation tends to carry a different texture. That can feel uncomfortable to commissioners accustomed to a more singular creative voice. It can also produce work with a depth and authenticity that more controlled, auteur-driven approaches struggle to achieve.
A Different Relationship With Storytelling Itself
Perhaps the most significant shift, and the hardest to describe without reducing it - is in how the next generation thinks about what storytelling is actually doing when it works.
There is a tradition of thinking about storytelling in primarily structural terms: the inciting incident, the three-act framework, the hero's journey. These are useful tools. They are also, for many emerging filmmakers, insufficient - not because structure doesn't matter, but because structure in the absence of genuine understanding of audience, context, and consequence produces technically competent but ultimately inert work.
The next generation tends to think about storytelling as something that happens between the work and the person experiencing it - a relationship, not a delivery mechanism. This shifts attention from the question "is the story well constructed?" to the more demanding question "what does experiencing this story actually do to someone, and is that something worth doing?"
It is a question that demands a different kind of preparation. Not just technical skill, not just narrative craft, but a sustained curiosity about the people the work is for, their lives, their existing beliefs and assumptions, the cultural context they bring to any act of watching. And a willingness to let that understanding shape creative decisions from the earliest stages of development, not just in the final edit.
Because the next generation of filmmakers does not exist in a vacuum. They exist within an industry structured by gatekeepers - commissioners, distributors, platforms, broadcasters, funders, whose decisions determine what gets made, what gets seen, and whose creative voice gets amplified. The relationship between an emerging generation with fundamentally different orientations and the institutional structures that control access to audiences is one of the defining tensions in the industry right now.
That is what we will explore next week.
Thinking Ahead, Part 2: The Gatekeepers - Power, Principle, Responsibility and Openness in the Film, TV and Video Industry. Publishing Friday 12 June on horizoncollective.com/blog
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