‘The Ceremony’ Filmmakers On Shining A “Nuanced” Light Migrants, BAFTA Nomination & Future Projects

You can’t always live in the past. In some cases, reinvention and the suppression of the emotional baggage you carry are the only things essential to your survival. Writer-director Jack King’s The Ceremonyproduced by Hollie Bryan, weaves a touching story about two men who, despite their differences, find themselves connecting through their shared sense of humanity and morality.

Shot in black and white, the story follows Cristi (Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu), a young undocumented Romanian car-wash supervisor, and Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), a gruff undocumented Kurdish employee, who work their lives away washing cars in Bradford, an industrial city nestled in West Yorkshire, England. When one of their fellow migrant coworkers (Mo’min Swaitat) suddenly ends his life after being accused of stealing from a client, Cristi and Yusuf must work together to quietly dispose of the body out of fear of being falsely caught up in a crime that could upend their lives, the lives of those in the migrant community around them, and expose their troubled pasts.

In 2024, The Ceremony took home the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence  at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The movie has also garnered nominations at the 2024 British Independent Film Awards and Outstanding Debut by a British writer, director or producer at the 2026 BAFTAs.

Here, King and Bryan talk to Deadline about the importance of telling authentic migrant stories, the challenges and crafty resilience in independent film making and what they’re working on next.

DEADLINE: How did the idea for The Ceremony come about?

JACK KING: About 12, 13 years ago, I made a short film that was set in a hand car wash. And through the process of trying to find a location for the short, I met lots of interesting people, including some of the intimidating, callous and slightly criminal car wash operators. Essentially, I got a little window into a world where I realized there were all sorts of young Romanians that were being exploited by him and didn’t have much in the way of protections. They were often sleeping in chambers at the back of these dingy, little unregulated spaces. But then when I had written the short, it didn’t have anything to do with that part of the situation. The short was a complete fiction inspired by the aesthetic of these car washes.

The short ended up being a failure though because, I think, it lacked authenticity. I didn’t make a film about the people that were actually working there, and I didn’t interrogate that enough. I think I was scared because I was a lot younger then and I didn’t speak the language and all these other sorts of barriers. It really chewed me up a little bit that I’d almost misrepresented the situation, I should have done the things that I saw.

So, The Ceremony grew out of the seed of frustration that I felt with myself and not adequately telling a truthful story. And so, then I began a longer journey of going back into car washes and talking to those young Romanians that I’d seen and that I’d met, and building a story around some of those conversations that I’d had with people. From that, I met this big Kurdish community. I live in Bradford, Yorkshire and there’s these big Romanian and Kurdish diaspora communities. And I thought, Oh, this is interesting. You’ve got these economic migrants and refugees and still in the asylum system from all over the world not being able to talk to each other, working under one small roof, all alone in all God-given hours in the pissing wind and rain, and just cleaning cars for very little money. And so, I wanted to just get to know that and get to know them and build a story around them.When I did that, it became more about seeing that these people aren’t their situation, they’re not their circumstance. There’s more to them, obviously, than we see in the news and the media.

DEADLINE: Hollie, you hear about this story, what’s the first thing going through your mind as you board this project?

HOLLIE BRYAN: Well, me and Jack have known each other quite a long time. We’ve been working together for almost 15 years. So, I was there when he was doing the short film, and knew where the idea came from. For us, it was at the point where we needed to make something. I’m really familiar with all of Jack’s scripts and all of his projects, but this was the one that we thought we could probably do. Because we didn’t have a lot of money, we were like, we can probably do this on a smaller budget. It feels very relative to where we live in Bradford. It was helpful that we knew the area so we could dive in.

DEADLINE: Why was the black and white color style the appropriate way to tell the story for you?

KING: The main reason was to move it away from documentary realism and lean more into the allegorical feel of the film. I wanted it to feel a bit more like a fable. And I think because I’ve been talking so much with those people about faith and all these other kinds of things, [the allegorical] bleed into it. I felt like making it timeless because I thought it would help take the narrative away from recognizable, modern-day current things, because it’s not even a story necessarily about now. It’s about just people generally. And then, it’s the idea that we’re seeing the Yorkshire Dales in a way that we’ve never seen. I tried to make it look like some sort of barren planet, like a rugged alien planet through the eyes of these outsiders who’ve never been there. That’s how we’re seeing it, like they’re seeing it for the first time.

When you don’t know one place from another, you don’t recognize anything. It’s just this kind of monochrome, liminal space. It’s not specifically anywhere. It is just like the earth, the elements. And also, it’s cheap [laughs]. It helps with budget and we’re a micro-budget film that shot in 12 days. There’s only so much you can control, and I think black and white gives you that added level of, we can get away with a bit more than usual.

DEADLINE: Speaking more about the Yorkshire Dales, I was in awe with some of these locations. Because it does feel sparse, but using the wintery landscape with the fog and other natural elements really elevated the story. How did you find some of these specific locales?

BRYAN: We know the area quite well because we live so close to it. So, we just spent a lot of time going around a lot of hills and going to local pubs and speaking to farmers.

KING: It was very much a case of using what’s at your disposal. I’m always a bit surprised how there’s not that many films shot in that part of the Dales. There’s a postcard version of it, but the actual Dales is very barren and dead. There’s no trees, the sheep have destroyed everything. I just thought it was so cinematic.

DEADLINE: What was the most challenging thing about putting this film together?

BRYAN: We spent a lot of time doing prep for the fact that we were only shooting in 12 days. At the time that was really hard.

KING: Finding money.

BRYAN: Actually, that’s the correct answer.

KING: That was hard. That was the worst bit by far.

BRYAN: Yeah, getting people to take the film seriously was a challenge because not many people are making micro-budget dramas in the U.K. And then there’s the logistical challenges of actually doing a shoot in this way. But we treated it like we were all living together in a pub. Similar to how you shoot a short film, like a family, and then all the rest becomes manageable.

DEADLINE: Your hard work paid off with a BAFTA nomination. How does it feel to have made it that far?

BRYAN: I mean, it’s validating for us and it’s validating for the film. It is chipping away at leveling the playing field by just showing that we’re sitting alongside multi-million pound budgets. It’s that feeling of, you don’t need to necessarily make a film on that scale to make a film that people enjoy and want to see.

KING: It makes [the process we went through] better. I’m happy. A lot of the time there’s been a lot of “what if” questions and feeling depressed about the fact that the film wasn’t doing as well as we would’ve liked. But, we had a great success at the Edinburgh Film Festival, but after that it was a year of rejections and not getting anywhere. We couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t get a distributor. Then it felt like, well maybe you can’t make a film like this. It will disappear into obscurity because it’s the [big blockbuster movie] system or nothing else. But then I also thought about how all my favorite filmmakers come from making films with no money. They start that way and then they grow a career over many films.

In the U.K., it feels like you’ve got to make a big splash instantly, from the beginning. And it feels like anything less than that is a failure in some way. But I was like, you want to have the freedom to fail and not that kind of pressure. And I think maybe that helped us actually in the end because we didn’t have that level of pressure on us. So we could just make what we really wanted to make, what we knew we had to make. I’d spent 10 years thinking about what I wanted to say, do you know what I mean?

DEADLINE: The dynamic between the two characters is interesting to me. Who was harder to write for between Cristi and Yusuf?

KING: It was harder to write for Yusuf, the Kurdish character, because he is so quiet, but you don’t want to hide behind a silent character. It was always the challenge of getting that character to speak because he’s so stoic and unknowable. That was my experience with a lot of the older Kurdish guys that I met and men that have been through great difficulty and are refugees and have lost family and such.

So much of [their emotions are] internalized. I couldn’t really get people to talk that openly with me about [their experience]. Instead they would invoke some talk about their faith or say things like, “I’m fine. God’s with me.” And that made it harder to get into [their psyche]. So, the challenge in creating his character was, how do you show that without him telling me? I’ve got no stories to draw on directly from these interviews. So then it just became a case of, “We need to cast somebody who’s got a very good face that tells a story.”

DEADLINE: What’s the next project for you?

BRYAN: It’s another film set in Spain about a British psychic medium.

KING: It’s about a washed up, former tabloid celebrity psychic medium who’s living in Benidorm in the South of Spain.

BRYAN: It’s where all the British expats go. We’re just about to start casting and are trying to raise some money.

KING: We still don’t have money [laughs].

The Ceremony is now available to stream on Prime Video and Apple TV.