British filmmaker Billy Lumby brought his feature directorial debut Florid to the San Sebastian Film Festival, where it had its world premiere as the closing film of the New Directors section. The film follows Jamal, a young man living in supported housing in East London who hears voices and is trying to balance his medication with his musical ambitions. It is a story told from the inside out, with the audience experiencing the world as Jamal does.
Lumby, a BAFTA nominee for his 2015 short film Samuel-613, has spoken openly about why he wanted to make this film. The way schizophrenia has been shown on screen, particularly in horror movies, has often linked the condition to violence and unpredictable rages. That pattern bothered him. “I wanted to draw attention to an area of our world and our modern contemporary society that many people are not aware of,” Lumby said in an interview with Variety.
A Story Rooted In Real Experience
Florid follows 25-year-old Jamal, who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He lives in a supported housing block alongside other people with mental health issues. Frustrated by the side effects of his medication, he decides to stop taking it. The voices he hears become more frequent and more intense. He builds a friendship with Kyla, another resident, but as the voices grow louder, Jamal must confront the blurred line between reality and past family events.
The film draws partly from Lumby’s own mental health experiences. He has described “autobiographical elements” in the story but went to great lengths to achieve additional authenticity. Over several years, he researched the U.K.’s National Health Service and its mental health system, visiting psychiatric wards across London, shadowing social workers, and meeting people with mental health experiences along with their families and carers.
Lumby was heavily inspired by the Hearing Voices Movement, which rejects traditional psychiatric notions that voices are merely hallucinations to be dulled through medication. The movement argues that voices can be a valid part of someone’s identity and history and do not always exist as a negative experience. “When he’s well, he can ignore these things and it’s just like a little anxious thought in the background,” Lumby said about his main character.
Casting From The Community
Carrying the film as Jamal is Jonathan Jules, best known for Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, in his first lead role. Lumby noted that it is not easy to act in a mentally unwell state in an authentic and accurate way. During filming, Jules wore earpieces on set, with actors in another room speaking into microphones so he could hear the voices live and respond in an unrestricted way. “There were these little moments where his eyes twitched — it just made it feel so real,” Lumby recalled.
Saskia Chana plays another resident of the supported housing and a potential love interest for Jamal. But many of the other roles went to non-actors that Lumby met during the extensive development process. “We have real psychiatrists, social workers, real people with lived experiences, people with diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar and severe mental health experiences,” he said.
Jamal’s care coordinator is played by Claire Holman, a real NHS care coordinator who Lumby says “opened a lot of doors” in the mental health community for him. Lumby explained that Holman and others from the mental health community wanted to be involved because they were passionate about the subject matter and had not seen their lives represented properly on screen before.
Three Voices Inside Jamal’s Head
Making the editing process complex was the fact that Jamal hears three distinct voices. There is a little girl, representing his self-worth and highly critical of him. Then there is the voice of real-life rapper Unknown T, who hypes him up. “That’s his more grandiose side, building up his ego and making him think that big things are going on in his life,” Lumby explained. But most destructive is the voice of Jamal’s stepdad, a negative and paranoid voice that tries to convince him to doubt the intentions of those around him.
After principal photography wrapped, many months were spent in post-production augmenting the voices to create the right tone and weave them into the overall soundscape.
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Production And Festival Placement
Florid is produced by Rupert Lloyd, an Oscar nominee for Theeb, and Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, known for Blue Story and Boxing Day. The film is produced by Atar Studios and Joi Productions, in co-production with Film i Väst and Filmgate Films, in association with Academy Films. It has support from BBC Film, in association with Head Gear Films and Metrol Technology.
The film runs 84 minutes and is a U.K.-Sweden co-production. It was selected as the closing film of the New Directors section at San Sebastian, which ran from September 18 to 26, 2026. The section opened with Jaime Lorente’s The Bad Son.
The main purpose of Florid, according to Lumby, is awareness. He noted that mental health is the least funded area of the NHS. “There’s a lot of stigmatization and misrepresentation, and I think the more that we open up and discuss these things, the better. Not everyone may like my film, but hopefully it causes some kind of discussion and debate around severe mental health. People talk about depression and anxiety, but in the case of severe mental health, I think it’s something that’s still not fully understood.”
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