LAST TRAIN HOME
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Last Train Home, Directed by Jessi Gutch | (Image is for mood reference only)
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JESSI GUTCH | Writer/Director (she/they)
Jessi Gutch is an award winning filmmaker who is interested in telling reflexive stories that occupy the space between fiction and non-fiction. Her work touches on themes of grief, mortality, psychogeography, nostalgia, compassion, and community, always trying to imagine something more radical and unknowing.
She is a nominated artist for this year’s Arts Foundation Awards Fellowship and in 2024 was an artist-in residence at Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. Her debut documentary feature, Blue Has No Borders, premiered in the International First Feature Competition at Sheffield DocFest 2025, and was BIFA longlisted for the Debut Documentary Director award.
Living with a rare incurable ovarian cancer called Sertoli-Leydig means a career and a life lived in the moment. But Jessi continues to envision a longer term future nonetheless and so is in financed development of her debut narrative feature My Cells are Trying to Kill Me with BFI/Delaval Film, and pre-production on short drama Last Train Home – previous winner of The Pitch Fund’s Best Drama Prize and finalist in Primetime’s Empower Fund.
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Project Type: Short Film (Fiction)
Status: Financing (May 2026 shoot)
Production Country: UK
Production Company: Last Train Home Ltd
Language: English
Writer / Director: Jessi Gutch
Producers: Cat Marshall, Victoria Emslie
Logline: Set in a hinterland between a hospice bed and a steam train full of ghosts, in this dreamlike coming-of-death story, Layla is determined not to die before seeing her friend Eve.
CAT MARSHALL | Producer (she/her)
Cat Marshall is a Yorkshire based producer working in film and high-end tv. She was Associate Producer on the feature film adaption of the hit west end musical, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021, Amazon Studios) directed by Jonathan Butterell, which was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film in 2022. She most recently produced Mars for Mercury Studios, a short film from an original idea by multi-instrumentalist Yungblud, written by the award-winning Chris Bush and directed by Abel Rubinstein. Mars was longlisted for the BIFA Short Best film in 2022 and premiered at London Film Festival the same year, with its North American premiere at Tribeca 2023. Other producing credits include Liam Williams’ comedy short The Coaches (directed by Jonathan Schey) for Sky Arts in 2017; and documentary short My Mad Spirit Woman written and directed by Jessi Gutch for Sheffield DocFest, 2022. Previously Cat was with the multi award-winning production company Warp Films for over nine years, working in production across their slate. Highlights include Shane Meadows’ The Virtues (Channel 4) and This Is England ’90 (Channel 4); The Last Panthers (Sky Atlantic); and feature films YARDIE (StudioCanal) ’71, (StudioCanal) and Ghost Stories (Lionsgate). She is currently developing her own slate of film and tv projects and was chosen as one of the BFI’s Insight Emerging Producers in 2023. Previously Cat has been chosen for: Edinburgh Talent Lab Connects 2022, BAFTA Connect, Screen Yorkshire Flex 2021, Women in Film and TV Mentoring 2020. Alongside producing, Cat co-runs Transforming Film, with trainer Nim Ralph, providing consultancy, training and advocacy around trans identity and experience for the screen industries. www.transformingfilm.com
VICTORIA EMSLIE | Producer (she/her)
Victoria Emslie is a British Actor and Producer, known for her work on Downton Abbey, The Theory Of Everything, The Frankenstein Chronicles, The Danish Girl, 12 Monkeys and Grace. She is the founder and CEO of Primetime, a global visibility platform helping the Entertainment Industry find and hire more women and non-binary folk working behind the camera (above and below the line). In 2023, she launched a fund for underrepresented filmmakers at Cannes Film Festival. Recent Producing credits include short film Truckload, directed by Aella Jordan-Edge, starring Jodie Whittaker and Joe Dempsie which will have its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2025; Jessi Gutch’s short film Last Train Home, and executive producing on Emma Moffat’s Scope starring Antonia Thomas and Samantha Spiro. Victoria has won and been nominated for numerous awards including the inaugural Shaker of the Year award and Entrepreneur of Excellence at the National Diversity Awards 2024. Primetime was also selected as EFM Startups in Berlinale in 2021. She also sits on BAFTA’s Disability Advisory group, is a full voting member. Primetime is also listed as a resource in the BFI Diversity Standards.
Project Goals:
Cinema almost entirely shies away from the natural process of dying, often reducing it to a final gasp or violence. This ties into a wider fear of bodies which age, wither, metastasise, deform and don’t conform to ableist ideas around what constitutes normal. And so, ultimately, the reason we want to make this film now is because of the lack of depictions of, specifically, the dying process itself, in the nuanced, complex, beautiful, messy, layered way that it deserves.
Conversations around death in the US/UK are taboo and platforming this conversation so that people can approach death with empowerment is crucial. More than half of the UK (58%) say talking about death, dying and bereavement is the ‘elephant in the room’ (Co-op study, 2023). In a US study that asked participants to rank their willingness to talk about various taboos, from money to sex to religion, death was ranked last at 32 percent.
Whilst I never want to deny the sadness and pain of death, I also want to imbue it with spirituality, magic, and hope - because my lived experience is that all these things can coexist. More people urgently need to understand that a keener sense of mortality actually enriches our lives and the fragile world that we are all interconnected with. With the rise in AI, and a global economic system that sees us as cogs in a machine, it has never been more urgent to understand why it matters that our knowledge of time being finite is precious.
Director’s Statement:
If non-religious, how might we still reimagine the dying process to be more transcendental? This project is informed by six years worth of thinking, dreaming, imagining and contemplating death and dying, since the year of 2019 when, aged 27, I found out my cancer was incurable, my best friend died by suicide and I started chemotherapy in a hospital ward where I was often around people that were dying. Having since experienced a perspective shift which enters into a more unknowing, spiritual place, I have become fascinated by deathbed phenomena and what it might hold for me personally, accounts of which go back to ancient times about visions of deceased loved ones coming to visit people in their last days of life. Last Train Home is thus a semi-autobiographical film; an expressionistic rendering of protagonist Layla’s (40) deathbed phenomena. At its core, the film is about two friends being reunited in a liminal world between life and death, and how difficult, but beautiful, goodbyes can be.
We will shoot in a style that is expressionistic and textured, leaning into the dreamlike through shooting on 16mm, and putting the viewer in a state that is illusory and visceral. The colour palette will be a return to the earth - with elemental colours of greens, browns, yellows, blues taking centre stage. Sound design will be extremely inventive - bringing in sounds from the living world and entangling them with the sounds of the dying world - where more birds fly than humans. A hypnotic and ethereal score will elevate the atmosphere.
Whilst I don’t necessarily believe in an afterlife, I have embraced an unknowingness about energetic forces and the idea that love persists in mysterious and sometimes metaphysical ways after we die - through others. This is why the storyworld of the film will exist in this interesting, rich overlap of different plains of consciousness and existence. I have found most spiritual comfort in turning to nature and observing the intricacies of its continual cycle of decay and renewal, and the idea of oneness - where human beings are connected into these cycles rather than separated. Dungeness (the Britain’s only desert) where the film is set, is uniquely symbolic of this – no boundaries, a desolate landscape with wooden houses, power stations, lighthouses and expansive gravel pits. Yet it possesses a rich and diverse wildlife within the National Nature Reserve in one of the largest shingle landscapes in the world. The communities of plants and animals living at Dungeness are unique, precious and exceptionally fragile, reflective of Layla and Eve’s state of being.
~ Jessi Gutch, Writer / Director Last Train Home