Joshua (23) is a Soldier in the British Army. His baby daughter, Beth, has become his sense of purpose. He feels a profound responsibility to provide for her in a real and whole family unit.
He works tirelessly to achieve officer promotion, believing this will overcome reservations held by his fiancée, Karen, and convince her of his qualities as husband and provider. In the evenings he cares for his housebound mother. She is a burden, for which he feels both duty and resentment—a living reminder of his troubled upbringing.
Joshua is unnerved by the arrival of a returning soldier - Private Reese - whose past is intimately linked with his own. A spiralling conflict with Reese quickly becomes the external manifestation of the conflict within Joshua himself.
Joshua’s stature within his platoon shifts. If his chance of promotion is lost his ambitions for family and fatherhood will collapse. His whole being is threatened. And the soldier knows what to do when threatened.
He retrieves a contraband weapon from its hiding place and steps towards his enemy. He looks Reese in the eye, and shoots.

Frontier takes its audience through a door marked PRIVATE into the working reality of the military and the psyche of one of its young men. Joshua is a soldier who, shaped by his mother and structured by the Army, lives in a state of perpetual motion - towards promotion and fatherhood - motorised by a deep-seated fear of his own fallibility.
The military and family unit serve as a crucible in which to explore tensions between individual and institution, and the universal conflicts we all face in seeking to achieve balance between the responsibilities of work and family.
Frontier is character-driven, employing elements of mystery and psychological horror to create a tense, kinetic experience that gets under the skin of anxieties faced by us all.
Frontier will move inside the rhythms of an institution that remains cinematically unexplored. The audience will experience an intimate reality inside the military garrison via the activities of a Private, its most abundant and expendable resource. The demands it makes upon his body, his psyche and emotions; the skills the military teaches him, the life it gives him; its tensions with the civilian parts of his life and self. This complex world of collective relationships and the conflicts within them will be rendered without stereotype, cliché or judgement.
The garrison and the various iterations of family home that we find in Frontier - the cluttered rooms of Margaret’s desolate bungalow; the middle class normality of Karen’s parents’ home; the ambivalent promise contained in the married quarters that might be Joshua’s new family home - embody the institutions Joshua struggles inside of. His movements are charged with the tension he feels within them.
I’m fascinated by the connection between the individual, their body and the landscape they inhabit; and the military working class landscape is one I’ve lived in and understand. My camera will move fluidly with Joshua and his trained physicality through the corridors, hallways, stairwells, bedrooms and dormitories of the garrison and family house. Frontier will be a film of motion and controlled aggression, in which external objects become resonant motifs whose meanings evolve with the progression of the narrative. It will be scored with the sounds of movement and struggle, conflict and dying that characterise Joshua’s internal and external worlds.
Frontier offers a visceral and compelling experience of stark military and domestic landscapes, within a thoroughly modern context.