Charlie Shackleton's limitless films

“Unlike other countries, it’s not optional in the UK. If we want to show a film, we have to pay them to get the certificate. At the time of the project, it was a fixed amount, whether it was Disney wanting to release The Avengers or a filmmaker like me, distributing his micro-budget film on his own,” he says. In fact, this was one of the things that changed following Paint Drying , with the introduction of a tiered system, which determines an amount to be paid according to the number of screens on which the film is to be distributed. “Today it’s cheaper than it was 10 years ago. It’s improved a little… but the principle is the same.”

Paint Drying is, moreover, one of the major events in the Indielisboa 2025 programme: in its first appearance in Portugal, the film is shown in an exhibition format in the Sala Rank at Cinema São Jorge — the same room where, during the Estado Novo, films were shown to the censors of the dictatorship.

In addition to the obvious symbolic charge, there is also an evident component of exploration in this exhibition format, or we are not dealing with a filmmaker who is very attentive to ways of seeing, who has already explored formats such as 3D in video-essay projects such as Lateral (2024), or virtual reality in his 2022 multimedia performance, As Mine Exactly (both absent from this cycle). “I don’t think I’ve ever made a film without thinking a lot about the context in which it would be seen. I’ve made things like The Afterlight , which literally can only be seen in a cinema, as well as projects that have never been shown in cinemas and that in my mind don’t belong there.”

This subversive streak, of constant questioning of the barriers that exist in the artistic world, also extends to his reflection on new digital audiences — a world where Shackleton has a kind of permanent viral status. Everything, once again, is the fault of Paint Drying , which in recent years has become a phenomenon on the Letterboxd platform, a social network dedicated to cinema, with thousands of users using the film's page as a proxy to share their day-to-day lives, their achievements and difficulties, in an authentic digital “micro-community” around the film.

[Charlie Shackleton talks about the phenomenon surrounding the “Paint Drying” community on the social network Letterboxd:]

“It’s really weird, in a good way,” he says humorously. “This year, the site interviewed me at Sundance. Before, most people who posted on the page had no idea who I was, or what the movie was. But since that interview, people recognize me on the street, people on dating apps ask me if I’m ‘the guy from Paint Drying’. It’s a weird form of celebrity, and I find it really funny,” he says.

Regarding these platforms, Shackleton acknowledges the danger of stealing space from those who, like him, started online — “Sometimes I wonder, if I was 16 and starting out today, if I would have any chance of being recognized” — but, on the other hand, he argues that they can have a beneficial potential.

“Going to repertory cinemas in London today is a young activity, I’m often the oldest in the room. When I went when I was 18 or 20, I was among a hundred septuagenarians. Even if we want to be cynical and say ‘oh, young people only go to see the Jacques Rivette retrospective so they can log the film and say they saw it’ — great! It’s something that can be used. I’d rather cinema become cool again, than be a super niche thing that doesn’t interest the new generations.”

Also looking to the future, we asked him whether his considerable experience in documentary filmmaking could lead to a fiction film. The director is categorical: “I have no interest whatsoever. Most of the work I have done in documentaries, in archive filmmaking, has always had some kind of ‘limitation’, and that is good for me. I like the friction that comes from dealing with real things. Maybe I can use some mechanisms from fiction, working with actors, for example. But I need limits that ‘trap’ me in my films, so that I can use them to my advantage”.