Hove-based film-maker explores creeping bureaucracy with new feature

Hove-based film-maker Nigel Chaloner offers his first independent feature, Automatic – a tech-feature film made in and around Brighton exploring the creeping influence of bureaucracy, technology and automated decision-making.

The film asks how it all impacts on people’s individual freedoms.

“I suppose you would say it is a sort of psychological drama,” he explains. “It's about bureaucracy. I spent 40 years working in bureaucracies, moving around, and it seems to me that everything that we do is becoming more and more formalised and bureaucratic. I blame it all on Microsoft and the internet. Every task that can be written down and given to someone else is written down and given to someone else.

“And that suits the auditors. It means lots of jobs for risk assessment officers and for bureaucrats. An example is I live in a block of flats. We've got electricity in the commonways. It's all fused and it's all safe but there is a recent regulation that means it has to have another special safety cut-out. The fact is that the people that are pushing that are the people that make the devices and that make the regulations.

“I think there is an imbalance between the massive corporations that can afford to handle these kinds of things and the smaller ones that get put out of business because of them.

“This film is not about the future. It is about the now that is happening right now in our society. Quite a lot of sci-fi is about what will happen if we carry on as we are, but I get the feeling that we are already in our dystopia especially with AI coming in. More and more people are starting to think like computers. Rather than computers freeing us they're making us into bureaucrats more and more.

“I was very lucky to have a loan of some corporate-style offices, and the scene is in a bureaucracy, a call centre where everyone is doing pointless jobs and having meetings where nothing is ever decided. You go into the office and you meet people and everyone is talking, and everyone else thinks it's rubbish but no one complains and then the next week you have the same meetings again.

“I started writing this several years ago. I went off to Vietnam and spent about four weeks in a little hotel getting up at 6 in the morning and writing through until 10 in the morning. That was 2024. In January 25 I started organising and casting. We started filming in June or July 2025.”

Filming included Chanctonbury Ring, a house in Seaford, offices in Kemptown and Nigel's own two-bedroom flat which doubled as a number of different flats.

Nigel has organised a cast and crew screening for the film but is now entering the film into a number of film festivals: “I decided to start right at the top and go for the big ones and just see what happens. A lot of festivals won't take it if you've already had a premiere which is why I just did the cast and crew screening but I will take it from here. I'm trying the festivals and then I will think about distribution.”