Nominated for Best Documentary at London Short Film Festival 2016, Florence Kennard’s surprisingly emotive 11-min doc Norma’s Colours takes an abstract look at one woman’s life by exploring some of the items she’d amassed over her lifetime.

Excited by the challenge of telling a story using objects, although the themes covered in Norma’s Colours may already feel well-explored, it’s the director’s approach that makes this such a hypnotic watch.

Inspired by the film’s of Sarah Polley and Carol Morley, Kennard reveals she has an “on-going fascination with collections of objects, and the ways in which I can enliven them through my film-making”.

“I just instantly knew there was a story there that I wanted to tell”

Stumbling upon Norma’s story when her mum came home from work one evening (she owns a shop that sells vintage clothing) and unleashed 8-bags of salvaged belongings she’d obtained from a house clearance all over the kitchen floor, Kennard was instantly attracted to the huge “rainbow mess” now scattered over her home.

“There was so much, considering it was just one elderly lady that lived in the house”, says Kennard. “Then my mum said that in this house she’d also been shown all these boxes of mechanical birds. I just immediately started wondering what kind of woman would have owned all of these wonderfully eccentric things, and I basically begged my mum not to sell them until I had worked out how I could film them! I then made contact with Tina, the daughter who had taken my mum through all the belongings at the house clearance – she was clearing the house of her mother Norma, and everything in there was a culmination of a whole lifetimes worth of collecting. I just instantly knew there was a story there that I wanted to tell”.

Norma’s Colours is a thoughtful and considerate piece of filmmaking, though slow-moving at times, stick with it and its heartfelt approach and revealing nature makes it a truly moving watch.

Currently editing a new documentary shot in a rose garden in Hampshire, and developing another inspired by the National Trust’s Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk. The director balances her filmmaking with her full-time job at the BBC, where she is currently helping to develop a feature length project investigating people’s relationship with meat.