Best friends Javid Rezai and Stella Talpo have made a major splash on the 2026 indie festival circuit with their debut short film, The Belladonna. Operating independently from major studios, the psychological thriller has earned critical acclaim and prestigious recognition for its striking aesthetic and glamorous design.
We spoke to these two brilliant creative minds to find out more…
You describe The Belladonna as a reunion 26 years in the making, after you first made home movies and music videos together as kids. What was it like reconnecting creatively after all that time, and did making a film together feel surprisingly familiar or completely different as adults?
Stella: Honestly, it was one of those things like when you hear a song that immediately and viscerally brings you back to a certain moment in your life and you can smell the room you were in and every detail of the memory that it’s like you were literally reliving it. It was like no time had passed and most decisions didn’t even need deliberating. Javid and I spent every day with each other from age 7 to 13 (bar a year I moved country when the grief of not being together was so great).
We created our own world, our own language, our own container and we lived in it together every day in these formative years. It was a shared length of time that has shaped who we are and allowed us to make this film in an undefinably symbiotic way. It’s very special, because all of that was infused in the creation of the film and in the film itself.
Javid: It was a total dream come true to create The Belladonna together because it’s something we both dreamed of as kids, but we went in different directions with our careers and lives. To find our way back to each other to fulfil this dream felt unsurprisingly familiar. It was like we were kids again playing and having an absolute blast (just with slightly higher stakes!). We had a way of working with each other that felt so trusting and natural throughout the entire process, which was so special.
There was also a real feeling between us that didn’t ever take this moment for granted. We were so lucky to have this opportunity in our lives, to fulfil these dreams, so we just went at it full speed ahead with joy, trust, love, commitment and excitement.
The film brings together influences as varied as The Blair Witch Project, Scream, Jawbreaker and Clueless. How did you find the balance between the darker thriller and horror elements and the heightened, colourful world of teen comedy and pop culture?
Javid: Those were the films we loved growing up and that shaped so much of us, so it just felt natural to do something that balanced these two elements together. We didn’t have to think too much about it because it felt pretty natural to us to be playful in mixing these two worlds together.
Stella: Exactly! Those influences are so under our skin because it was what we were living and breathing together for so long, it just poured out of us in this new iteration that is ours. Art is imitation and it’s so interesting what happens when you absorb, digest and then express it… It’s incredible how you make something new, filtered through your own lens and friendship and how unique that thing can be. That’s the incredible thing about art.
Burlesque is built around performance, spectacle and control over how the body is presented, which makes it an intriguing setting for a psychological thriller. What drew you to that world, and what did it allow you to explore that a more conventional setting might not?
Javid: We had a few potential settings for the story as we developed, but when Stella suggested a burlesque club, it felt like a no-brainer. It’s incredibly glamorous, and I adore the idea of exploring the darkness underneath gorgeous, glamorous things.
Stella: I think the first thing that drew us in was the access Burlesque gives you into a world, a venue, an ecosystem of dreamers and performers and it is so rich in each of those elements. No two things are the same in Burlesque, it gave us room to play, to build spaces and characters and their respective looks and personalities. It’s also a very obvious space like many performing arts where we could explore competition and ego and this need for validation and using performance to find that.
Javid: The burlesque scene in the UK, and especially London, is huge, and it’s a world that felt like the perfect place to take audiences with us for some escapism, away from their everyday lives, as it’s a world many people have heard about but maybe have never stepped into.
You describe the film as “psychoglitter”, which feels like a perfect shorthand for something glamorous with a darker edge. How did you approach the visual style, costumes and use of colour to make the glitter feel unsettling rather than simply decorative?
Javid: Even though the world of the film is full of sparkle and glamour, we worked closely with our cinematographer Emmy Ren to ensure that the camera constantly stays close to all our characters, claustrophobically so, and that the world of backstage felt shadowy and almost gothic. Balancing that with the gorgeous sparkly costumes and hair & make-up, as well as the incredible set design, gave us that natural unsettling feeling.
The project is made by queer and female talent both behind and in front of the camera. Did that creative environment influence the kinds of characters, relationships or power dynamics you wanted to explore, and did it give you the freedom to approach the thriller genre differently?
Javid: What it really did was create an incredible community of people who understood our references with their whole hearts, who embraced the films campy genre-bending nature with excitement and who took the film under their wings and treated it with so much love and care. To have a team so closely connected on creating something this magical is truly a rare treat and I truly believe a lot of it comes down to the fact that we were a predominantly queer and female led team. There’s truly a different level of understanding, safety and joy to approaching your work when you feel so connected to your peers.
Given your shared history of dancing to Britney Spears and scaring yourselves with horror films, which of those childhood obsessions had the biggest influence on The Belladonna – and if you had to sneak one Britney song into the film’s soundtrack, which would you choose?
Javid: Biggest influence on The Belladonna would most likely be Jawbreaker. That film is part of the DNA of ours, with it’s glorious costume and sets, it’s mixing of genres in an unusual and new way, and all it’s campy glory that we appreciate and adore.
Which Britney song? We’ve been asked many questions on our run so far but never this and I’m absolutely obsessed. For me, I’d want to throw it back with something unexpected like Born to Make You Happy, and have Cherry and the burlesque girls all sing along to it in the dressing room… while Stella has a breakdown next door (naturally!).
Stella: Ooooo, what a question. I think for me probably Jawbreaker too! I think it has the perfect references of ‘the unraveling’ in a world of beauty of glamour and I can see watching The Belladonna back now, how somewhere deep down that was coming through. I also had so much scream inspo inadvertently coming through from I Know What You Did Last Summer, that one really stuck with me.
If I had to sneak a Britney song in… I probably would sneak in would be “What It’s Like to Be Me” from my favourite album of hers, ‘Britney’.
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