Damien O'Donnell

Damien O'Donnell's 35 Aside screened at Brief Encounters 1996 and has come back to the festival three times since. He was in Bristol in 1999 alongside Lynne Ramsay, "fresh from their debut feature successes at the Cannes and Edinburgh film festivals," to talk about his short film roots. He became a festival patron and returned to introduce the Beckett on Screen screening in 2000.

By 2004 the programme called him "a great advocate of the short film form – and Brief Encounters." He described himself in the 2002 programme as a "short-film-maker trapped in a feature film maker's body." O'Donnell has sat on the DepicT! jury three times, in 2006, 2007 and 2016, and his short How Was Your Day? screened at Encounters 2016.