What actually separates a working film director in London from someone who simply directed a few things is repetition under pressure — doing it again, differently, on a new brief, with a new crew. Fifteen-plus years of that is what taught Raj Randhawa to read raw emotion on screen and know what a scene is missing before it’s shot. Storytelling comes first here; the camera is just how it gets delivered.

That instinct shows most clearly in his feature work. Covenant of Life follows George Russell, a man paralysed after a car accident, weighing whether he has the right to end his own suffering — handled with enough restraint that the film never tells the audience what to conclude, only what to feel. The Foot of Clay takes its title from a biblical phrase about a god with a rare condition that makes him immune to physical pain but not to what he’s running from internally.

King for a Day, his next feature, moves the lens to modern-day London and a homeless man who stumbles onto a briefcase full of money — a premise that could tip into melodrama in less careful hands. Alongside the features sits Checking In, a short film built around a subject that rarely gets this much care: men's mental health.

Raj Randhawa doesn’t work in one genre and has no plans to start. Music videos, action thrillers, dark film, art photography, commercials — the throughline isn’t the format, it’s a refusal to let technical finesse get ahead of the story. A background steeped in music gives the visual side a rhythm; a habit of travel and reading widely keeps the reference points from going stale. What actually gets him back on set, brief after brief, is simpler than any of that: he likes making films, and he likes telling the truth about people in the process.