Zodiac Killer Project
True crime with an arthouse twist? British filmmaker and multimedia artist Charlie Shackleton shatters genre boundaries, inviting slow cinema enthusiasts to indulge in a true cinephile feast. Eschewing dry facts and calculated timelines, he presents an impressionistic portrait of one of America’s most baffling criminal mysteries: the legendary serial killer known as the Zodiac. Shackleton scrutinizes the structure of crime films and TV shows, simultaneously pinpointing their commonalities and dismantling their clichés. Thanks to the cinematographic eye of Xenia Patricia, the film comes alive through peculiar shots of enigmatic spaces, each frame a hunt for details that might have altered history, even as Shackleton acknowledges the futility of his quest. His leisurely woven narrative pulses with a profound passion for cinema as a tool to diagnose reality, showcasing virtuoso command of film language and a bold choice to forgo narrative fireworks in favor of what lives between words and images.
awards
Sundance Film Festival 2025 – NEXT Innovator Award: Charlie Shackleton
Charlie Shackleton
Charlie Shackleton is a British director, multimedia artist, producer, screenwriter, editor, and film critic who collaborates with publications such as Sight & Sound. He has been professionally involved in cinema since the age of 16. In 2018, together with fellow filmmakers, he founded the production company LOOP. Shackleton gained wide attention with his 2016 film Paint Drying, a 10-hour long static recording of paint drying on a brick wall, created as a protest against film censorship and the mandatory classification system in the UK.
Selected filmography
2013 Fear Itself (doc.)
2014 Beyond Clueless (doc.)
2015 Copycat (short doc.)
2016 Bad Language (short doc.)
2016 Paint Drying (doc.)
2017 Fish Story (short doc.)
2018 Personal Truth (short doc.)
2018 Access: Sheffield DocFest (short)
2018 Lasting Marks (short doc.)
2019 A Machine for Viewing (short doc.)
2021 Afterlight
2022 As Mine Exactly (short)
2024 Camera Test (King Cadbury) (short)
2025 Projekt Zodiak / Zodiac Killer Project (doc.)
Cast & Crew
