CLARA PETERSON

Clara remembers being in ninth grade. ‘Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities... I’d read it, I was visualising it as a screenplay and talking it out aloud. My mother overheard me. She said, “oh, maybe you should consider a career in film making!”’ And that is exactly what she did. Her latest production Daly City, one of 207 short films that pre-qualified in late 2025 for Oscar nomination in the category of ‘Best Live-Action Short Film’.

Daly City didn’t go on to make the shortlist, but alumni can watch the film for free, an autobiographical work, 16 minutes long, depicting an Indonesian boy and his mother navigating immigrant life in America.

Just talking to Clara, based in New York City, is enough to touch the excitement but also the grit needed to prevail at all in this segment of the film industry.

It’s not Hollywood in more ways than bare geography. It’s the world of independently financed and produced films that shun the large studios but still want to break through, to have impact.

Clara’s undergraduate school was the famous women’s liberal arts college Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she was a political science major.

She then came to Hertford College for the Hilary and Trinity terms of 2007, so an associate alumna rather than someone who matriculated in the full sense. Once she had graduated she promptly moved to New York City and started to build a powerful web of connection around creative film making, while working a series of no-glamour 9-to-5s that paid the bills.

‘One of the first people I met in NYC was Nick Hartanto, the film director, and it was his remembered boyhood story that formed the narrative for Daly City.’

How Daly City was made offers a glimpse into the world of indie film as it stands five years on from COVID, with AI threats swirling round, a recent scriptwriter strike half-forgotten, and mega-mergers ongoing in the world of Hollywood (Netflix-Warner Brothers-Paramount) and consolidation of relative newcomers like Vimeo, bought in September 2025 by an Italian tech company.

‘The budget for Daly City was about $60,000. I would describe short films as a discipline, as a practice. It’s a way for aspiring directors and producers to show what they can do, launch it at Sundance or one of the other indie film festivals, hope to make enough impact to unlock more investment and move on to a feature length project.’

Daly City is terrific, I suggest. Clara explains that the narrative is entirely true, a slice of Nick Hartanto’s autobiography, drawn from his boyhood.

‘It was important to Nick’s creative vision to capture the authentic look and feel of the place where the events of the story actually took place. That meant shooting “on location” in Daly City, California (pronounced ‘daily’). It’s in the Bay Area and it is rich with immigrants, to the point where there is a longstanding joke among locals that the famous Daly City fog is on account of all the rice cookers!’ His mother had taken food to a church potluck supper, passing off hastily bought Chinese takeaway as authentic Indonesian cooking. Having wowed the audience with the food, she was given a prize, provoking various layers of discomfort in the son and some exquisite dialogue in the car on the way home.

The whole sixteen minutes is touching and bracing simultaneously, not unlike a brilliant, written short story. We’re not going to spoil the plot by describing it to the end – do watch it.

The segue across from Daly City, set in the early 1990s, to 2026 and the Trump administration’s swerve towards anti-immigrant laws in the USA, is a natural one.

Clara says that if readers want to see how well indie film makers responded to rapidly shifting immigration policies in America, they might check out A Lien, a clever word play on ‘alien’.

Nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards, A Lien was made in 2023 but seemed to divine where things were going to go subsequently with the creation of ICE, featuring a tense green card interview that threatens to rip lives apart forever.

The blurb reads, ‘From critically acclaimed directors Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, this award-winning short is part love story, part urgent commentary on a system designed to separate rather than unite.’

Critiques like this are far more likely to come out of the indie end of the film world than the big, mainstream players.

Clara says that it is entirely common to raise the money for a short film from savings, friends and family. ‘It’s difficult to make a short film for any less than $10K and a feature for less than $300K, though I’ve seen every kind of budget miracle pulled off.’

She says of Oxford, ‘It was brilliant. It turned my world upside down in just the way I needed it to. Until then, I had been locked into a tight schedule of activities, sport, culture, and so forth. And now for the first time, I had a social life as well. I made friendships. Of the eight of us US students allocated to Hertford College, six gravitated towards the undergraduate body. But I was already 21 and with my good friend Lauren (from Cornell) we were allowed to join the MCR. We were also living in graduate student accommodation, so that was how it worked out.

‘The tutorials were also fantastic, and I remember learning about the European Union and carbon trading. Basically I jumped into elements of Oxford’s PPE degree. It was also my first experience of an all-nighter.’

The big career question we want to ask on behalf of other recent and soon-to-be graduates, is whether now, in 2026, you could still rock up at a city known for its creative film sector, and carve out your career there from a base of passion and determination.

‘You could but I chose a hard path! There is not much of a market, if I'm honest, for short films, which is why I’d describe them as a practice. And yet they do go on to have a life, and working with Nick Hartanto, we did sell one to HBO, The Dishwasher (2019). So we have had some success, but HBO bought it as part of a special programme to promote that kind of film. So I'm not saying that it was something we could easily duplicate.’

You have to be willing to take on other forms of paid work, says Clara. ‘Today, I balance grant writing – which is basically a second career that sustains me – with producing and I am working on how to pivot toward screenwriting and directing.

‘By doing, you learn. You throw yourself into it. And it goes from there. It's an amazing industry and an amazing network. If a bit chaotic and uncertain, and a bit mad, as in work all hours, and don't say no.’

Despite turning over every stone and working with one of the best PR firms in the business to mount a PR campaign aimed at pushing Daly City along the hard brick road to Academy Award nomination, the film did not make the shortlist of 15 films that would continue on to the final nomination showdown. Clara and Nick are now raising budget to cover remaining campaign expenses and hope that selling the film will help do so.

She adds that both NYC and the creative sector she works in haven’t completely recovered from COVID, that artificial intelligence is already eating into jobs formerly dedicated to backroom editing and other processing, particularly for the commercial world of advertising but also the creative sector. And then titanic shifts of ownership at the top of the big incumbent film houses, driven by cash rich streamers like Netflix.

‘TV has been hit hard by YouTube and by streaming. However, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to join the Directors Guild last spring, and the indie film track remains my main focus.’

Clara also has two feature films under her belt. Snatchers (2017) is ‘a very witty sci-fi comedy, well written, involving aliens that invade Brooklyn through Mennonite corn. It’s a cast of unlikely heroes trying to save the world. I'm very proud of it...’ she says. ‘A popcorn film. Film is meant to be entertaining! And this is funny. We need a certain number of reviews every month on Amazon, so if you watch it, please leave a short, honest review!’

Her latest 2025 production is Jackrabbit, another feature-length film. Clara describes it as a ‘mystery comedy’, really combining two different genres. She says the script is densely funny, with a very noir edge to it.

‘We’re submitting to top-tier festivals and are excited to see where it will premiere in 2026. After a run of festivals in 2026, it will most likely get released in 2027.’

Clara says that the major sales that had become the jackpot of the indie film festival world are being eroded. Sundance is still one of the most prestigious festivals in the world, but winners are less likely to sign a single big deal with a distributor on the spot. She speaks highly of Slamdance (February) but regrets that it has moved to LA (formerly Park City, Utah).

‘Woodstock was a real highlight for Daly City. And then there are others I enjoyed, like the Hawaii International Film Festival and Pittsburgh Three Rivers Festival (November); and Indy Shorts International Film Festival in Indianapolis (July).

‘It's a very rich and varied world.’

In a recent interview with her alma mater Wellesley, she spoke about the need to take on everything, plunge in, and do what you love. It's a refreshing change from a more corporate response. And shows that even in the indebted, inflationary, difficult years of the 2020s, still that you can find a way to follow your yellow brick road.