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Archipelago has been nominated as a FINALIST in the WEST LOTHIAN FILM FESTIVAL, to be held in Edinburgh, UK. A huge thank you for the WLFF crew for selecting us for this honour! Very cool 😎🎞️🎉

This marks our film's final festival stop in its long journey across the world. The team and I are very proud of the work it's done and we look forward to hear the results of the short with this festival.

TURNING | Short Film

He came back to save her… but he’s already changing.

In a world overrun by the undead, a once-famous musician returns to the ruins of his past with a fading cure—and one last chance to save the woman he loves… even if it means losing himself completely.

“TURNING” is a dark, emotional horror short about love, obsession, and what happens when survival comes at a cost. Would you risk everything to save someone you love… knowing what you might become?

CREDITS

Written & Directed by Nathan Colquhoun

Produced by Nathan Colquhoun & Matt Oxley

Director of Photography: Andrew Amanaki

Music by Jonathan Bruno

Key Makeup: Adriana Diaz

Production Design: Chivonne Macfarlane

Archipelago's still got some life left in her yet, and the Stay Gold Film Festival has welcomed it with an OFFICIAL SELECTION!

A big thank you to the team at The Indie Showcase for picking our film, very cool to be a part of your festival :)

Archipelago (2023)

Official selection at 24 film festivals, winner of 8 awards and 8 nominations.

The joys, challenges and heartbreak of fatherhood connect three men from different walks of life; discussing their experiences of raising a family, navigating through the course of events and of finding a sense of purpose through love and loss. Archipelago is a uncompromising triptych on fatherhood, based on the multi-award winning short stage play "Rentals", written by Gregory Hardigan.

Archipelago IMDb page

WINNER

'Best Narrative Short Film': Toronto Art Film Spirit Awards, Canada - 2024

'Best Underground Short Film': Short Film Factory, Hungary - 2024

'Best of the Fest': Nassau International Film Festival, USA - 2024

'Silver Award - Narrative Short': International Independent Film Awards, USA - 2024

'Best Director': Nitiin International Film Festival, Malaysia - 2024

HONORABLE MENTION

'Best Acting': Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival, Greece - 2025

Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival, Italy - 2024

Reale Film Festival, Italy - 2024

NOMINEE

'Best Cast': AltFF Alternative Film Festival, Canada - 2023

FINALIST

West Lothian Film Festival, UK - 2026

Lytham International Short Film Festival, UK - 2024

'Golden Actor': Golden Short Film Festival, Italy - 2024

SEMI-FINALIST

'Best Short Film': Folkestone Film Festival, UK - 2024

'Best Actor Short Film': Sweden Film Awards, Sweden - 2024

'Best Director Short Film': Luleå International Film Festival, Sweden - 2024

Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival, USA - 2023

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Stay Gold Film Festival, USA - 2026

Heart of Gold International Short Film Festival, Australia - 2025

Culver City Film Festival, USA - 2024

Luleå International Film Festival, Sweden - 2024

Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival, Italy - 2024

Manchester International Film Festival, USA - 2024

Lily Indie Film Fest, Ukraine - 2024

Cine Paris Film Festival, France - 2024

New West Film Fest, Canada - 2023

Nashville Play Film Festival, USA - 2023

PRODUCTION TEAM

Screenplay - Gregory Hardigan

DOP - Jack Kelly

Composer - Marianne Slavich

Art Director/ Assoc. Producer - Karen Ways

Script Editor/ Exec. Producer - Frank Leggett

Director/ Producer - Clayton D. Moss

Cast - Leonard Sun, Clayton D. Moss, Rowan Moses, Danny Barton and Patrick Houle

Copyright Ⓒ Contraband, 2023

-Daniel J. Boorstin

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

-Confucious

"Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know."

-Socrates

"Between knowledge (epistēmē) of what really exists and ignorance (agnosia) of what does not exist, lies the domain of opinion (doxa). Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance. A wise ignorance is an essential part of knowledge. All I really know is the extent of my own ignorance. I know that I know nothing. For as there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists, or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world."

-Plato

"Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance."

-George Bernard Shaw

"Not ignorance, but the ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."

-Alfred North Whitehead

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

-John Archibald Wheeler, 1992

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

-Charles Darwin

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

-Isaac Asimov

"...ignorance is more than a void - and not even always a bad thing. No one needs or wants to know everything all the time; and surely all of us know things we would rather others not know. Knowledge grows out of ignorance, as a flower from honest soil, but the direction of movement is pretty much one way. Here, though, ignorance can also be a prompt for knowledge, insofar as we are constantly striving to destroy it - fact by fact."

-Robert Procter

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

-Maya Angelou

"-And seeing ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,"

-William Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 2

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would not get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking, because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know.

Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.

If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations."

I stumbled upon two brief reviews of my short film on an Italian Arthouse Cinema website. What a nice surprise! Thank you to both Anna and Antonio, your reviews are elegant and beautiful.

Below is the translation in english:

Archipelago by Clayton D. Moss

Delicate, powerful, direct… 'piercing'. Archipelago beautifully captures the imagery of shared emotions that resurface without ever completely disappearing. -Anna Troiano

Late 1991, Street Fighter 2 was released. Depending on how much pocket money my 11yr old self carried each day, I played the hell out of it.

There were two Street Fighter 2 machines near where I lived at that time. One was in a fish and chip shop, situated on the corner of the main road. This was a popular haunt after school and, being a bigger, flashier cabinet, brought in the crowds. Yet the other was a generic, run-down, brown cabinet located 100m away outside of a fruit and vegetable store along the highway. This one was my favourite of the two.

That cabinet was just plain old, vanilla World Warrior. Often paired up with another arcade game like Golden Axe, Thunder Fox, Shinobi or Final Fight. Other times it was solitary, ever in attract mode. Occasionally other kids would play it if you rode past on your BMX and didn't mind the owners loudly arguing with each other in Greek while they stacked melons and apples.

I pumped so many coins into it over the months since it released, money that could've been better used for savings or an actual game console. One day, playing as Blanka, I got all the way up to Ryu's stage. I lost the match and had one more credit left. I accidentally bumped the 2p button on the countdown and swore once I realised what I did. I randomly chose Ryu but something weird happened. Ryu showed up fighting Ryu and he was wearing the same coloured Gi as the other. I'd never seen that before. What I didn't know at the time was that I discovered a bug in the game by accident.

Excited, I remember telling my friends at school the following day. They didn't believe me at first, which frustrated me no end. So I showed them, I did exactly what I did before and it happened again. There! Some thought it was cool, but most brushed it off after the fact claiming it "wasn't that impressive." Regardless, I was still pretty stoked about stumbling across it. Dumb luck, nothing more.

My friends and I tried doing the same with the other characters but nope, it only worked on Ryu's stage with Ryu. Someone said I should tell Megazone, the major Australian videogames magazine of the time, about it. So I wrote in to them.

Megazone published my "cheat" right around the time of my birthday in '92. I had a subscription so the issue came delivered to my door. Reading it now, I either wasn't as thorough with my explanation of how to replicate it or they simply edited it for brevity. I'm sure they tested it on their end before committing it to print.

I had long thrown out that copy of Megazone years later, which wasn't wise in hindsight. I had lost my proof. Which, in the intervening years as an adult, made me wonder about it all long after the fact. As we all do sometimes. A sense of compounding doubt that creeps up as time rolls forward. I mean, I remember what I remember but I also asked myself, was it some imagined, fever dream in the blur of childhood memory?

I needed to find the magazine again. After a bit of digging around, sure enough, somebody on the internet had scanned the exact copy of the magazine and archived it. Megazone - issue 22, printed on page 57 :)

I'm very proud to announce that 'Archipelago' has been made OFFICIAL SELECTION to screen at the 19th edition of the Heart Of Gold International Short Film Festival.

The HOGISFF will be held between the 9th-12th of October, 2025 at Gympie, Queensland. Archipelago will be in the "Screeners Picks" category of the festival, showing between 11.30am-1.30pm on October the 12th at Gympie Cinema.

Here's a trailer for the upcoming film 'TURNING'

Set in the 1980s, an ex-rockstar is on a journey to find and cure his zombie infected wife.

Writer & Director: Nathan Colquhoun

From the end of 1999 through to 2001, I had seen and experienced enough with extras work to know that I wanted to explore further into the craft. It can be a boring old slog at times, standing around and restricted to being nothing more than a human prop. It was only a small glimpse of the work behind the scenes and there was so much more I wanted to delve into. Things like acting techniques, scene work, live theatre, voice and movement study.

So I spent the better part of 2002 studying acting with a small, private drama school located in the inner-city of Sydney. It also moonlighted as a repertory theatre company and held regular stage productions at the end of each 12-week term. Monologues for the first termers, two-handers for the 2nd and lastly, full stage productions for the final term students and graduates who were free to return. The course mainly focused on the basics: Stanislavsky, Shakespeare and Improv. I performed two plays with them: 'Shopping and F**king' by Mark Ravenhill and 'A Comedy of Errors' by Bill S.

Then in 2003, long after I finished studying, a casting notice appeared in my inbox one day for a stageplay entitled 'Pick-ups'. So I moseyed on along to audition for it and was cast in the production shortly after. It was basically a series of short comedic vignette's centred around the dating scene. It was to be performed on the main stage at the Old Fitzroy Hotel, a pub located in Kings Cross, Sydney.

I was quite chuffed by the fact that I had, so early on, snagged a role in a semi-professional show held in a popular theatrical venue. Much less that it was the first time I was paired up with a cast that mostly comprised of working actors and drama school grads, who came from larger, more prestigious schools in Australia and from overseas. To be honest, I expected all this to develop much, much later for me.

However, I was also feeling a bit like the wildcard of the cast. It dawned on me that I was the least experienced actor of the cast, so I wasn't as precise or skilled as my colleagues were. My 'craft', as it were, wasn't tempered by the flames of criticism nor real-world experience. And it gave me a horrible sense of inadequacy from the outset. I had nothing to justify my being in the show. I'd achieved nothing of note. I hadn't toiled away in the trenches, to coin a phrase, unlike the other cast members. So who the fuck was I to be there? If creative points of view arose in the rehearsal period, I would (stupidly) yield to offering any input and let the more experienced others take the reins rather than contribute for the good of the ensemble.

Travis, our director, noticed this after a few rehearsals and taking me aside for a chat, I told him exactly what I wrote in the first few sentences from the paragraph above. My inadequacies got the better of me. He listened and agreed with the sentiment at first, of course he knew how green I was. However, in reply, he stated his confidence in my being cast with the ensemble. That no matter how much of an imposter I felt about it, to him, I still belonged there because he wanted me there. "That," he said, "was all that mattered." This gave me security. In time I understood that all the insecure nonsense I imagined was simply my ego seeking 'validation'. (A curse some actors never seem to shake off.) It was the first and last time I ever felt that way. We all have to start somewhere...

So I commit myself to learning. I would observe the others work while figuring out their inner processes on stage. Just hashing things over with the other cast and the director, figuring what was the most honest and truthful way to deliver the text under the staging constraints we had to operate under. I often spoke with the others to see where they had come from, who they worked with before. As an example, one cast member had studied with Sandy at the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC. Having just read his book and picking their brain about their process, they summed up my queries with, "I may have studied Meisner but I don't use it." I thought that was quite interesting.

In the lead up to opening night, our producer managed to score us some publicity with the above article in a popular weekly lifestyle magazine. As a result, we had sell-out shows every night for the entire month of May in 2003. While another play performed in the same venue for most days of the week, we'd take over the space on the 'off nights' and use it for our own purpose. We had a matinee and night show for Sunday and another show for Monday night. Notoriously shitty days to perform a play on and yet the seats were filled to the brim. I remember peeking out behind the curtain and seeing the audiences clamber all the way to the top seats of the Old Fitz's notoriously spartan seating.

Given the minimalist nature of our production (basically the cast and 6 fold out chairs) we fit in quite seamlessly with little to no impact on the other production's set, which was essentially a war bunker draped in camouflage netting. Apropos for us, given the context of our play. Our light and sound tech even confirmed that the main stage show struggled to reach the number of audience members that we had received. If I remember correctly, their sales were so poor that midway through the season, the theatre cancelled their Tuesday performances and gave it to us. Again, those extra days sold out and we were happy to get more time to play onstage.

This production was pivotal in giving me my first real agent. It wasn't a situation where one stopped by to watch us, pointed at me with a definitive "YOU!" and offered to rep me right there in the foyer. No, it was much lamer than that. One of the cast members asked if I had one during one rehearsal. I said no and they casually remarked that I should contact their agent. That was all. It was one of those throw away conversations we all have that you don't pay much attention to at the time but you sometimes wonder afterwards, "What if?" I didn't give it much thought until long after the show ended. I sent their agent an email, not expecting a reply, and got a call back straight away. Funny that...

I was thrown into the deep end and learnt an incredible deal about the industry through this production. Exposing me to the responsibilities, expectations and workload of professional performing artists. What it was like being part of a massively successful show. It essentially became my pathway out of extras work.

Bully has been made OFFICIAL SELECTION at the 14th Anatolia International Film Festival in Turkey.

Lets suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream.

And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure, you see. And after several nights you would say, "well that was pretty great."

But now lets have a surprise. Lets have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is going to happen to me that i don't know what it's gonna be.

Then you would get more and more adventurous. And you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally you would dream where you are now.

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - you can feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in... is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

Alan Watts

In other news, Archipelago is OFFICIAL SELECTION for the Culver City Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA! Woot! A huge thank you to the CCFF team for selecting us, you have amazing taste!

The Festival will be held between the 9th-15th December, 2024 at the Regal LA Live. This means our short will be seen on both coasts of the USA in December, very cool! :)

UPDATE 14/12/2025: I've just read that Peter Greene, one of the festival producers of the Culver City Film Festival, had recently passed away. During the course of Archipelago's film festival run, I was contacted by Peter out of the blue.

I had the good fortune of having a handful of film festival directors and producers go out of their way to reach me personally during 'Archipelago's journey on the festival circuit and express their love for it, regardless of whether it was accepted into their film festival or not. But Peter was the first and only one who I spoke with over the phone in person. Which was a testament to his character. He didn't have to go the extra mile, but he did.

He emailed me not long after I submitted to his film festival, asking me to call him. But he didn't state what the reason was. It was vague and had a bit of mystery to it all. See, I was very aware of Peter's acting work growing up. His portrayal of villain's on film was genuinely frightening and visceral. A great villain in a movie should make you feel uneasy. That's as it should be. So, understandably, I was both somewhat curious yet a little bit nervous as to why he wanted to have a chat with me, of all people. I mused over what it possibly could have entailed but in the end, I really had no idea.

Unlike his on-screen personas, Peter was warm, softly spoken and a gentleman. He told me of his fondness for our film and the impact it made on him before inviting me to have it screen as part of Culver City Film Festival. I was stoked. Coming from someone of his acting pedigree, I was quite humbled and accepted his invitation right away. After a few more questions, he asked me why I submitted to the CCFF. I just told him outright that the positive reviews for his festival on Film Freeway reflected on him and his business partner so it was a no-brainer for the production team to put it forward. I think he appreciated that sentiment.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Grab your disco fries, we're heading to New Jersey! 🍟😉

Archipelago is now OFFICIAL SELECTION for the 9th Annual Nassau International Film Festival. Many thanks to the festival team and judges for picking us! 👍 Schweeeeet!

Held on Saturday the 7th of December, 2024 from 6.30pm onwards at the AMC Marketfair in Princeton, NJ, there will also be a panel discussion during the festival too.

I'm very happy to announce that the Paradise Film Festival has awarded me the honour of BEST ACTOR for my role in the short film 'Bully'. A humongous thank you to the judges and selection team at PFF, you guys rock!

When I produced Bully, the short suffered terrible audio issues on the day. Try as I might to work around every cicada chirp, bird tweet, car exhaust and construction noise in post, the short languished on the festival circuit (never film in the middle of summer). I'm pretty stoked that the short has finally been given some serious recognition. Props to Natalie, my director, the film crew and especially also to my talented co-star who gave an honest, vulnerable and nuanced performance.

Thanks to new audio technology, i'm in the process of re-releasing Bully with a newly polished and balanced vocal track, the way it was originally envisioned it. Keep your lids peeled ;)