Maya, a sculptor, agrees to create a portrait of her estranged father, David, a once-celebrated writer now coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis. As she builds his likeness in clay, Maya is forced back to the question that has shadowed her life: what led to her mother’s suicide, and what part David played in it.

Starring Bessie Carter and Alistair Petrie, with Poppy Lee Friar and T’Nia Miller.

I wanted to explore inheritance: what we carry from our parents, what we reject, and what we unknowingly repeat. Family dynamics are being looked at with a new kind of honesty. Old silences around mental health, absence, blame and emotional neglect are harder to keep. But this reappraisal does not always lead to clean catharsis. Often, it leaves people in a more complicated place: wanting peace, but not necessarily reconciliation.

Model Parent resists the language of closure. It asks what it means to look at a parent not as a symbol, villain or wound, but as a flawed, fading person, without letting them off the hook. 

I was drawn to the tension in the act of sculpting: the intimacy of looking closely at someone you have spent years choosing not to see. A portrait is never just the subject; it is also the artist’s hand. Making a likeness is a form of confrontation. 

The film is about the unresolved tension between presence and absence: the person in the chair, the likeness emerging in clay, the parent who was never fully there, and finally an object that may outlast them all.