Hot Shots 2025: Lucile Smith

One of two of this year’s Hot Shots with family connections to the funeral trade, Lucile Smith spent every day after school at a factory that made coffins.

Her journalistic ambitions were unleashed after current a airs film-maker Fiona Lloyd-Davies invited her to a screening of her film about sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and offered her work experience.

Smith’s directorial debut, feature doc Forgotten Soldier, won the audience choice award at the London Jewish Film Festival and was picked up by PBS. She then worked as an assistant producer with two Oscar winners: director Orlando von Eisiendel on Convergence: Courage In Crisis, and producer Simon Chinn on The Princess.

Recently, Smith has delivered two standout 90-minute docs for BBC Current Affairs. On Scandalous: Phone Hacking On Trial, she endured hefty legal threats and had to work closely with the BBC’s lawyers. Dead Calm, which exposed alleged criminality against migrants by the EU-funded Green coastguard, led the Greek prosecutor to open up a murder investigation.

Smith is also developing her own long-gestating project. Casting 12 couples and singletons in lockdown to document how quarantine affected their relationships, she captured a snapshot of that time. She’s now working with an editor to sift through the hundreds of hours of footage for a feature doc.

Dan Howell, a series director at The Garden, who is working with Smith on a Channel 4 access series about regional organised crime units, describes her as “a truly original thinker”.