Illuminating Change in ‘No Mean City’

It begins with a light. The burning glow of a rich tungsten filament filling the frame. From the very first shot, No Mean City shows that the temperature of light can do more than tell you what time of day it is.

For writer and director Ross McClean, the idea behind the film was born out of something almost indescribable. On returning to the home where he grew up, he found himself unsettled by a shift he could sense but not place. The geometry of the streets hadn’t changed. The houses were the same. What had changed, his father explained, was the light: Belfast’s aging sodium street lamps were being replaced by LED. Suddenly, the night felt colder, more exposing, and somehow alien. “Something I’d known all my life had changed covertly, almost without permission,” McClean explains, “LED lighting doesn’t really allow the darkness to exist in the same way… everything was illuminated.” That became the seed from which the film grew.

No Mean City unfolds over a single night shift, following a small crew of streetlight technicians as they navigate Belfast’s waning pockets of sodium light, in contrast with the stark, blue-white glare of the LEDs spreading across the city. At a moment when much of the UK and Ireland has completed its transition to LED, Belfast’s delay provided a rare opportunity to capture the shift on film before complete erasure. The outcome is a poetic exploration of light as character, memory and metaphor.

“Can the lights actually be the protagonists?”

“Once we realised the lights could carry the story,” say McClean, “everything else started to fall into place.” Ronnie McQuillan’s cinematography is central to this ambition. Firstly, he suggested making sure the lights were seen in every frame, placing them as protagonists in the story. Secondly, rather than smoothing over the technical differences between sodium and LED, the film amplifies them.

A key tool in solidifying this approach was the use of pro-mist filters, which allowed highlights to bloom and soften, and sodium lights to spill organically into the frame. “Often what we do in our practice is to try and get back to a place that feels organic and human and natural,” says McQuillan. 

Sodium’s warm glow becomes tactile, while LEDs are rendered as clinical and exposing. This is not accidental: white balance and colour temperature are pushed deliberately to heighten the emotional divide. 

“The aim was to create enough of a shift between LED and sodium that you really feel that quite intensely,” McQuillan explains. That intensity, in turn, becomes the engine of the film’s impact, creating a visceral sense of tension between warm comfort and cold alienation.

“The grade was about listening as much as shaping, says colourist Karol Cybulski. “Rather than pushing warmer and cooler tones for style, we used them to translate the emotional temperature - a way of protecting and crafting the feeling already present in the images, rather than forcing them into something new.”

“I remember there were a couple of places, mainly on wides,” she continues, “where there would be a pesky LED in the background which didn’t suit where we were in the story, so we had to use a detailed bit of vfx to make sure we were absolutely placing it either in cold or warm. It was all very intentional.”

The first time we see an LED streetlamp is a couple of minutes into the film, and there’s a very intentional slow zoom in to it, with unnerving sound design, that tells us this is personal. “I really wanted that first introduction of the LED to be really intimidating... like something intruding” says McClean. 

Between observation and construction

This commitment to intentional craft extends to how the team handles its documentary elements. The workers we see are real technicians, captured during genuine night shifts. McClean describes it as a ‘creative documentary.’ “You’re working with real people, but you still go in with intention. Sometimes that intention means letting things happen. Sometimes it means saying action.”

A key challenge, as McQuillan notes, was knowing when not to intervene. While in the cafe scene the existing lighting was replaced in a non-invasive way, much of the exterior light is whatever existed on site. The crew’s task was often to subtract rather than add. To turn off unnecessary sources and embrace shadow which allowed the principal light to define the space.

“We mapped out routes in advance and looked at where they would be working to try to preempt where we were going to be shooting” says McQuillan. “More often we’d be asking them to turn off street lights, as opposed to adding any lighting.”

“It felt really exciting,” says McClean, “like a road movie.” Many of the scenes feature the technicians driving through darkness. To capture this, the van was rigged with low level lighting so as not to distract the team, and to allow the streetlight outside to shape the interior world. “That's where the high base ISO came in useful,” says McQuillan. “I think sometimes we were literally at 1%.” The cinematography in these moments becomes choreography between controlled and uncontrolled light. Between what the filmmakers bring and what the city already offers.

Additionally, the technicians had a camera rig on the front of the vehicle. “I have to say that it's one of the most impressive driving performances I've ever seen!” affirms McClean.

“I remember it was really important to have a sense of movement in the grade,” says Cybulski. “We tried to play with the light by shooting on the high ISO mode on the FX6, so you would sense the moving through space,” adds McQuillan, “you can really embrace the unknown and unexpected in documentary making.”

Feeling the change 

Woven through the nighttime sequences are signifiers of broader urban change; a radio broadcast about tech companies moving into the city, images of glassy new buildings awash with bright white light. McClean and McQuillan both voice concerns about modernisation and the rate of change; almost imperceptible over time, but irreversible once it happens. 

Belfast’s history is one of transformation. In No Mean City, the transition from sodium to LED becomes a metaphor for that experience: familiar structures illuminated differently, shadows reconfigured, comfort displaced by efficiency.

Borrowed from a phrase applied to Belfast and Glasgow, and from a historic photobook depicting Belfast’s industrial rise, the title ‘No Mean City’ has layered resonance. It suggests pride and uniqueness, but also invites reflection on what it means for a city to be “no mean city” in an age of rapid technological and societal change. There is irony here, but also affection. The film does not romanticise the past, nor does it condemn the present outright. Instead, it asks us to consider how we feel about the spaces we inhabit, and how ‘little things’, like the colour of light, can shift those feelings in ways we barely notice until they are gone.

Reflecting on revisiting the streets in which they filmed, now all illuminated by LED, McQuillan says “the film is a sort of mini time capsule of what the city used to look like.”

By the time dawn begins to chase the night away, No Mean City has done something rare: it has made you feel transformation. The lights will continue to flicker on across cities around the world, unnoticed by most. But through McClean’s lens, we are reminded that these changes are not just technical. They are cultural, emotional, and deeply human.

No Mean City is currently on the festival circuit.

Credits:

Director Ross McClean
Producers Conal Clapper, Heidi Fleisher & Mike Paterson
Director of Photography Ronnie McQuillan
Editors Ross McClean & Phil Harrison
Sound Design & Re-Recording Mix Tamás Varga
Sound Recordist Stevie Lennox
Editing Assistant Ruairi Bradley
Production: Sandbox & Elemental
Colourist: Karol Cybulski

Recognition:

Visions Du Réel - Short Film Competition (April 2025)
Sheffield Film Festival - Short Film Programme (June 2025)
Docs Ireland - Short Film Competition (Winner Best Short - June 2025)
Curtas Vila do Conde - International Competition (July 2025)
Clermont-Ferrand ISFF - International Competition (January 2026)
Curto Circuíto - Short Competition (August 2025)
Drama ISFF - International Competition (Special Mention - September 2025)
Camden IFF - Short Programme (September 2025)
Cyprus ISS - Short Competition (October 2025)
Cork IFF - Short Competition (Winner Best Director - November 2025)
LEEDS IFF - Short Film Competition (Winner Best British Short - November 2025)
ALCINE Madrid - International Short Competition (November 2025)
FRONTDOC Aosta - International Short Competition (November 2025) 
Camerimage - Short Doc Competition (Winner - November 2025)
PÖFF Shorts (Black Nights FF) - Short Film Programme (November 2025)
Festival Tout Les Courts - International Competition (December 2025)
Glimmerglass Film Days - Short Programme (November 2025)
Florence Short Film Festival - International Competition (February 2026)
True/False Film Fest - Short Programme (March 2026)