Landline

Matt Houghton

In 2010, a chaplain from Cheshire set up a helpline for gay farmers. Landline journeys into the world of the people who called.

Matt Houghton is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His films experiment in particular with form, often treading the line between fact and fiction. His short film Landline won the 2018 Grierson Award for Best Documentary Short and his first short Dear Araucaria, made in partnership with the Guardian, won the Audience Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015. The following year, Matt released two more shorts, Four Weddings, his second film made with the Guardian, and Hands Up, Chin Down which had its world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018. Matt’s film, Earth To Cop is an eyewitness portrait of climate change and played at the COP26 opening ceremony in front of 140 world leaders before being picked as one of Vimeo’s Best Of The Year 2021. Matt’s most recent short film co-directed with the film’s protagonist Georgie Wileman is an intimate, self-documented portrait of a photographer living with endometriosis. This Is Endometriosis had its world premiere at HotDocs 2022 and screened at Everyman Cinemas around the UK. Matt produces his own films. Named as both a Film London Lodestar and a member of Berlinale Talents 2020, Matt is a founding member of Fee Fie Foe and an associate producer on Notes On Blindness, The Real Charlie Chaplin and the forthcoming Netflix Original feature Apollo Thirteen: Survival. Matt is currently in production on his debut feature, With A Gun And A Radio.

“Landline is a short documentary about the only helpline in the UK for gay farmers. Through a series of recorded telephone conversations and reconstructive visuals, the film uses the helpline as a lens through which to view the experiences of LGBTQ people in the British farming community. In a world that prizes traditional masculinity and in which ideas of ancestry are fundamental, being gay can be isolating. Suicide rates are extremely high in both young farmers and gay men in particular, and combining these can be a recipe for tragedy. But there are also thriving gay scenes in the most rural of towns, stories of unexpected friendships and relationships, and moments so unlikely that they could only happen in real life. Candid, intimate and shocking, Landline is a snapshot of a group of people bound together by circumstance but so often isolated from each other.”

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