In a landscape saturated with noise, the Listening Pitch has steadily emerged as a vital space for films that invite us into a conversation to engage with untold stories that open up new dialogues round what it means to really listen. Created through a visionary collaboration between Aesthetica and Audible, the initiative supports short documentaries that centre listening as both method and theme. In doing so, it has reshaped our understanding of how sound, silence and subtlety can drive storytelling. The programme champions projects that cut through spectacle to offer something more radical: the cinematic of the unheard.
Since its inception, the Listening Pitch has produced a slate of genre-defying work. These films have gone on to receive wide recognition, screening at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and receiving nominations for the IDFA Award for Best Short Documentary. Others have found digital homes on The Guardian, engaging global audiences. Each year, the selected filmmakers interrogate what it means to truly listen. The initiative remains dedicated to storytelling that emerges not from volume, but from attention.
In 2024, Liberty Smith’s Greensound portrayed a group of Welsh men who, after the closure of a steel plant, found solace in forest walks, highlighting nature’s role in healing. Ornella Mutoni’s The Things We Don’t Saydelved into intergenerational trauma stemming from the Rwandan genocide, showcasing young adults confronting their pasts in group therapy sessions. This poignant film was later acquired by Guardian Documentaries. In 2023, Meghan McDonough’s Old Lesbians documented the efforts of activist Arden Eversmeyer, who traveled across the USA recording oral histories of elderly lesbians, preserving a fading community’s legacy. Matthew Herbert’s Banana offered an auditory journey tracing the life of a banana from plantation to consumer, shedding light on the environmental and human costs of mass consumption.
The 2022 winners approached the theme of listening from diverse perspectives. Birdsong by Sparsh Ahuja and Omi Gupta explored the dying whistling traditions of the Hmong people in northern Laos. Jade Ang Jackman’s Speed of Sound provided a portrait of self-professed blind Olympic-winning skier Carina Edlinger. Ross McClean’s Echo told the story of a man who communicates via an intricate system of radios. In 2021, Jessi Gutch and Liz Jackson’s Blind as Beat portrayed Jackson’s journey from an ex-documentary filmmaker who used sight as a primary sense to someone who is visually impaired and relies on hearing.
Collectively, these films underscore the significance of listening in understanding diverse human experiences. By focusing on themes like environmental impact, historical preservation, and personal healing, they have resonated globally, prompting audiences to engage more deeply with the world around them. The Listening Pitch continues to champion stories that might otherwise remain unheard, fostering a more empathetic and informed global community. These are films that invite audiences to reconsider what they think they know, and to hear not only what is said, but what lingers in the gaps. Now in its fifth edition, the Listening Pitch continues its commitment to amplifying voices and stories too often marginalised.
Announcing the 2025 Listening Pitch Winners:
The 2025 Listening Pitch winners – Carin Leong, Cicely Hadman and Roberto Duque – were selected from a highly competitive international pool for their visionary approach to documentary filmmaking. Each of their films boldly explores the sonic dimensions of human experience. Carin Leong’s Untitled Fetal Heartbeat Filmdissects the politically charged use of ultrasound audio in the US abortion debate, using experimental sound design to interrogate how machine-generated signals are turned into moral arguments. Cicely Hadman’s Stamp on My Threshold Like a Cowboy is a formally inventive portrait of queer intimacy, where the act of listening becomes method and metaphor as her ex-lover films her responding to questions about herself. Meanwhile, Roberto Duque’s Voice Shift follows a transgender woman’s vocal therapy journey, expanding into a broader exploration of how voice shapes identity, survival and social perception. These works push the boundaries of auditory storytelling, continuing The Listening Pitch’s legacy of elevating underrepresented voices and redefining how audiences connect with documentary narratives.
Untitled Fetal Heartbeat Film
Director: Carin Leong
Singaporean documentarian Carin Leong brings a rigorous, poetic lens to the intersection of science, culture, and perception. Based in Brooklyn, Leong’s most recent film, Sandcastles, was supported by Field of Vision and premiered at SXSW 2024; she was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 Faces of Independent Film. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Hakai Magazine, and The Atlantic.
In Untitled Fetal Heartbeat Film, Leong dissects the mythologised sound of the so-called “fetal heartbeat” – a manufactured audio signal that has been emotionally and politically weaponised in the US abortion debate. With archival footage, experimental sound design, and a grainy sonographic visual palette, the film interrogates how ultrasound technology translates bodies into meaning. Leong’s essayistic documentary listens closely – not just to the science, but to the cultural narratives that have turned machine sounds into moral imperatives. What results is a meditation on truth, translation and the politics of perception.
Stamp on My Threshold Like a Cowboy
Director: Cicely Hadman
Stamp on My Threshold Like a Cowboy marks the nonfiction debut of Cicely Hadman, an accomplished screenwriter and story producer whose credits include Killing Eve, Happy Valley and Renegade Nell. After years of sculpting storylines behind the scenes, Hadman returns to her roots in directing with a work that is raw, intimate and formally inventive.
In this audacious experiment, Hadman asks her former lover to film her while answering a series of deeply personal questions – all about Hadman herself. The filmmaker becomes the subject, the narrator becomes the cinematographer, and the act of listening becomes both method and metaphor. Set within the ephemeral terrain of past desire and shifting identity, the film exposes the recursive way we construct ourselves through others. Loosely structured, emotionally exacting, and formally reflexive, Stamp on My Threshold is as fragile as it is fearless.
Voice Shift
Director: Roberto Duque
Roberto Duque is a UK-based producer and director whose editorial sensitivity and lived experience infuse his work with rare empathy. His credits span Channel 4, Hulu, CBS, and Discovery, and his previous short documentary Facing Evil was published by The Guardian Arts. His film The Writing’s on the Wall recently won the Audience Award 2025 at the Blind Walls Film Festival.
Voice Shift follows Carly, a transgender woman undergoing vocal therapy to align her external sound with her internal self. But the film doesn’t stop at technique. Through sonic experimentation and deeply personal storytelling, Duque expands the frame to include multiple trans voices, exploring the societal codes embedded in how we are heard. Is voice identity? Is it survival? Or a form of control? Blending poetic motifs with observational intimacy, Voice Shift is a resonant, timely study in how identity is shaped by pitch, inflection, and public expectation – and how liberation begins with being heard on your own terms.
These three documentaries exemplify the heart of the Listening Pitch: films that explore listening not just as an act, but as an ethics. Whether examining the mistranslation of scientific sound, the gendered acoustics of survival, or the relational choreography of intimacy, each work underscores how listening can reshape what we know- and who we are. In an industry often driven by spectacle, the partnership between Aesthetica and Audible affirms a different kind of commitment: to quieter stories, to rigorous enquiry, to truth. This is storytelling that doesn’t speak over – but listens beside. The Listening Pitch stands as a testament to the belief that through careful attention, we uncover what is most deeply human.
All three films will premiere at Aesthetica Film Festival on 8 November 2025. The full festival runs from 5-9 November in York, UK. Tickets coming soon. asff.co.uk
Words: Anna Müller
Image credits:
Image courtesy of Guillaume Lavrut. Model: Darius. ©rockmenparis.
Film Still. Banana. Matthew Herbert (2023).
Film Still. Old Lesbian. Meghan McDonough (2023).
Film Still. Greensound. Liberty Smith (2024).
© Metin Ozer via Unsplash.
© Ryan Cuerden via Unsplash.
© Marek Piwnicki via Unsplash.
