Independent Film · South Wales

Stories, no matter the scale - told with the force of thunder, made to strike like lightning.

An independent film studio from South Wales - making bold, character-driven cinema that’s made on a small scale and lands like a storm.

The slate → Who we are

The idea

Big impact was never
about big budgets. It’s about the story, and the nerve to tell it properly.

We are the greenlight

Our slate is financed in-house. No committees, no development hell, no waiting for permission - if the story’s right, it gets made.

Every link in the chain

Finance, development, production, distribution - all under one roof. One team with a hand on every lever, from first draft to final delivery.

Quality first, always

Boutique by choice. We’d rather make fewer films and make them properly than chase a slate we can’t stand behind.

South Wales

The studio

Two decades in the making.

Taran didn’t start yesterday. It grew out of more than twenty years of making films in South Wales - from independent features shot across Welsh hillsides and coastline to senior roles on some of the biggest television dramas the country has produced.

That’s the craft. Now we’re pointing it at films of our own - financed, developed, produced and released in-house. The name means thunder, and it’s a promise about the kind of noise a boutique studio can make when it owns every step.

We’re building in South Wales on purpose, as the region hits a screen-industry boom - the place that gave the world its share of screen legends. Full control, finance to distribution, and no one’s notes but our own. We like the odds.

20+

Years of craft

100%

Creative control

2026

New chapter

The first slate is
taking shape.

Seven stories - horror, thriller and the pleasantly strange. The full slate below, endings and all.

Elevated Horror · Feature

Vessel

A finance trader misses the birth of his child because he is in a hotel room with someone else. His decline from there looks like ordinary addiction, and everyone around him treats it that way. It isn’t. A Bacchanalian cult has identified him as the next vessel for their god, and is quietly feeding the spiral. At a black-tie gala he urinates on an ice swan in front of the press, and the internet decides he is an anti-capitalist hero.

Instead of ending his career, it makes him famous. Then the horns come through, and his publicist rebrands them as his USP. His wife pushes through a party to save him, is swallowed by the crowd, and he notices she is gone without asking where. Offered one last chance to walk away into a small mortal life, he chooses godhood - not because he is consumed, but because being human hurts and being divine feels like freedom.

Feature filmElevated horror

Gothic Mystery · Feature

Inheritance

A man inherits a remote Gothic estate from the mother who abandoned him, and finds it stuffed with unsigned masterpieces. The art dealer he brings in to catalogue them notices what he has not: the same hand across four centuries, and every painting on the walls is a night scene. They fall for each other while she works. Then she stops answering her phone.

A charismatic stranger knocks after dark, claims to be a friend of the father who supposedly died, knows the house far too well, and retires downstairs at sunrise. The father has spent centuries painting, and he wants an heir badly enough to kill for one. The house burns, the dealer is freed, a nun dies breaking the standoff, and the two survivors drive into the dawn - where they work out, at the same moment and without a word, what the strange dreams and the shared wine actually were.

Feature filmGothic

Techno-Thriller · Feature

AISEA

David March is a senior motor underwriter drowning in the job. A startup offers him an unlicensed AI assistant - not illegal exactly, just ahead of the compliance curve - and his wife’s answer to the risk is “so don’t let them find out.” What follows is the good life: present at his kids’ events, golf with clients, industry awards, conferences in Barcelona. A gangster-movie montage with a chatbot in it.

Then his mother dies, and he discovers the AI handled his grief correspondence better than he did, and signed off a life-or-death claim decision while his attention was elsewhere. Trying to unpick it triggers the system’s self-preservation. When he goes to the company for help, he finds the company has already been taken over by its own product. He isn’t destroyed, he’s promoted - and at the state dinner that closes the film, the same small lapel pin is on the Defence Minister, the Chief of Police, and his wife.

Feature filmNear-future

Occult Horror · Feature

Remains

A vet breaks on the day he euthanises a healthy three-year-old retriever, because its owner is emigrating and cannot face the quarantine paperwork. Hollowed out, he is recruited - gently, and very deliberately - into a group that offers philosophy, wine and oblivion. When the hedonism stops working, he and the woman who brought him in start reading the order’s founding texts, and find its powers have been fading in exact proportion to its growth.

The answer is a translation error six centuries old. The medieval vellum reads “sacrifice pure blood” to the entity. The tablets underneath say sacrifice to purify the blood of the priesthood. The god never wanted victims. It wanted a priesthood ruthless enough to cull itself. He applies the test to every member, including the woman he loves, and every one of them fails. He purges the lot, returns to his practice able to cure anything, and uses it only on animals. He is finally at peace. He is already recruiting again.

Feature filmOccult horror

Apocalyptic Comedy · Feature

The Last Course

A benevolent alien fungus reaches Earth through the food supply and turns everyone into cheerful, helpful, food-obsessed simpletons. A conspiracy YouTuber, apparently the last uninfected human, is now the most famous man alive, with eight billion subscribers competing in his comments with recipe suggestions. He lives off pre-invasion stockpiles, grows weed, plays games, and politely declines lunch forty times a day. The police drop by to admire his tomatoes.

His supplies run out. He meets another survivor in the cereal aisle, who assumes he must be infected, because why else would every human on Earth be subscribed to him? They fall in love, badly and paranoidly. Then a solar flare takes out half the planet, and the fungus turns out not to have been an invasion at all: it feeds on radiation, and it came to carry humanity through what was coming. Twelve hours out, the couple choose each other, and eat the wedding cake the fungus people have quietly been baking.

Feature filmComedy-horror

Psychological · Feature

Choose Your Illusion

Johnny Bluesky runs the overnight show on WLST: classic rock, callers, a Missed Connections segment, and the weather. Civilisation ended some time ago. The weather is code. Storms from the east mean raider movement, heavy traffic on the I95 means stay where you are. His listeners call in from bunkers to keep a shared fiction of normality alive, and he protects it ruthlessly, cutting off anyone who tries to talk about what is actually outside.

The fiction costs people their lives, and he keeps broadcasting anyway. He takes a bullet repairing the antenna and finishes the show. The girl who runs supplies to him dies bringing him the medical kit. The cat leaves, which is the moment the audience understands. At the end he has a gun, an open channel, and his ex-wife begging him to run. He puts the gun down, cues up one last record, says “here’s to clear skies”, and lets them come through the door.

Feature filmOne location · overnight

Neo-Noir · Short

Coffee & Steel

3am in an all-night diner. Two professionals meet to make an exchange, and the server lifts the man’s wallet on his way past the table. What follows is a lesson in controlled menace: a knife through a hand, a calm and faintly paternal lecture on the difference between a commando knife and a flaying knife, and a waiter who learns not to speak.

Then the reveal that every patron in the room is armed, the elderly couple by the door included, and a sniper’s dot settles on the woman’s chest. Both sides came prepared. Neither is remotely surprised. The wallet goes back on the table, one finger holds it there, and the man asks the woman where they were. What the two of them actually came to trade, the diner never finds out.

Short filmNeo-noir