The Starving Swans 

THE STARVING SWANS

Currently in the final stages of development, the fourth feature film from Baby Dog Films is THE STARVING SWANS. This haunting script has already secured awards from film festivals across the world. Our locations team have secured some truly stunning authentic locations in North Yorkshire, the perfect setting, with steam trains, sweeping moorlands, stone cottages and farm houses. Our production designers are hard at work creating WW1 era set dressings, working to complement our wonderful costume department. Principal photography is due to commence late 2022, so now is the perfect time to invest in this thought provoking and historically important feature film. 

A film that tells a story of inter-war Britain and the struggles of love, THE STARVING SWANS is perfectly poised for streaming platforms. 

Having a fragile and, at times, haunting LGBTQ love story at the centre of the script, serves to remind us that many men suppressed and hid their true nature during the conflict of war. In THE STARVING SWANS, such a story is centred around army captain, Wilfred James, the son of an Oxford Don and Jeremiah Casson, an ethereal, some would say, beautiful young man who had been a conscientious objector.

Wilfred James, a gentle poetic young man of 25, finds himself amid the sweeping Yorkshire moorlands, where he is healing from the scars of the First World War. Arriving at Yew Tree Farm, Wilfred is faced with Nora Casson, a widow who runs the farm, and her son, Jeremiah.

A cold unyielding woman of middle age, Nora is fused with the land and the endless cycle of work, prayer, and sleep. She has two sons, Levi, an embittered ex-soldier who was invalided out of the war and needs constant care, and Jeremiah, her biggest disappointment, as he refused to fight to serve king and country, and is a white feather coward. 

As the guns have fallen silent, Nora will not bend, instructing new arrival Wilfred to not speak to Jeremiah, or show any scrap of kindness.

Confirmed casting so far includes Jodie Prenger (I’d Do Anything, Waterloo Road, Casualty), Steven Arnold (Coronation Street, Bare, Thick as Thieves), Julia Haworth (Coronation Street, The Bay, Call the Midwife), Linda Clark (Hanging in There, Doctor Who, Emmerdale), Vin Hawke (Spitfire Over Berlin, Retribution), Olivia Charlotte Cole (The Last Consultation, Holding on to Nothing), Wendy Laurence James (Karli, Once a Year on Blackpool Sands), Ray Calleja (The Last Confession, Big Boys Don’t Cry, Closed Set) and Nicholas Anscombe (Memory Man, Last Night at Emilio’s, Chronicles of Syntax).