You’ve probably noticed it, too. Everyone seems to be a creative director right now. Filmmaker, photographer, artist, creative, but preferably all at once. And to some extent, it makes sense. For a younger generation that grew up with social media, the camera in our pocket gets better with every new iPhone, editing apps like CapCut have made cutting a video almost second nature, and learning how to shoot and package an idea often happens long before ever entering a studio. We all know the little tricks by now, from how the opening hook on TikTok has to catch us immediately to the cut that saves a Reel from feeling just a little too long. Of course, we might not be marketing experts, but growing up online has given us a pretty good sense of what catches attention, what people talk about and what reaches an audience.
Knowing how to make content travel, however, is not the same as knowing how to make a film stay with someone. Cinema currently offers a particularly interesting glimpse at where that difference lies. A group of young directors, by now you could almost call it a movement, is emerging from remarkably different corners of the creative world. Some learned by uploading to YouTube; others moved through fashion, music videos, shorts, or film school, yet their films share a closeness to the worlds they come from. Rather than a common aesthetic, what connects them is an ability to turn something highly specific into something that travels far beyond their own circles.
Obsession (2026) sounds almost too familiar at first. Someone desperately wants to be loved, makes a supernatural wish, and gets exactly what he asked for. Curry Barker takes that simple premise and shifts the horror towards something far more human, as desire slowly turns into entitlement and wanting someone becomes inseparable from the belief that they should want you back. The cursed wishing tree might set everything in motion, yet it is jealousy, insecurity, and, obviously, obsession that make the film stick.
To understand where Barker developed that instinct, it helps to go back a few years. The Alabama-born director started out shooting comedy sketches and horror with friends for YouTube, where putting work directly in front of people meant learning from their reactions in real time. In 2024, he released the $800 feature Milk & Serial there for free, cutting around 20 minutes shortly before uploading it because he felt the film needed to move faster. Soon, a DIY movie made with friends was being discussed across Reddit, HorrorTok and YouTube alongside major studio releases. Two years later, Obsession became a theatrical hit for Focus Features. Barker has since emerged as one of the most visible faces of what has been labeled “Gen Z horror,” moving from an online audience into cinemas without losing his sense for when an audience is still with him.
And then there is Kane Parsons, better known as Kane Pixels, whose route into cinema began online. He was 16 when he uploaded the nine-minute The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube in 2022, having already taught himself animation and visual effects through online tutorials and spent years experimenting with virtual environments. The video now sits at around 93 million views and 2.5 million likes. A24, an American independent production company, eventually gave him the opportunity to turn that world into a feature film, complete with 30,000 square feet of physical sets, while Parsons continued planning his shots in Blender. His visual language remained unmistakably his, even as everything surrounding it suddenly became much bigger.
The new adaptation Backrooms (2026) takes us into a different corner of the internet, although you might recognise the feeling immediately. Endless yellow corridors, fluorescent lights, and empty offices look strangely familiar, like a place from a dream you cannot quite locate afterwards. Imagine walking through this kind of labyrinth, turning one corner after another without ever really knowing where you are going or whether any of it is supposed to make sense. Somehow, getting increasingly lost is part of the film’s appeal, as liminal spaces, gaming, digital glitches and the strange nostalgia attached to early internet imagery turn something we mostly know from screens into a place you can suddenly imagine walking through yourself. It is a visual world Parsons knows well, having experimented with it for years rather than approaching it as something he first had to study for the film.
From endless digital corridors, My Father’s Shadow takes us somewhere very real. Akinola Davies Jr.’s film moves to Lagos during Nigeria’s 1993 election crisis. Two young brothers spend a day with their estranged father as political unrest grows around them, experiencing a national crisis through fragments they cannot yet fully understand. They notice changes in their father and in the people and streets around them before they can make sense of the politics behind it. The scale of the historical moment is felt through what happens to one family.
That closeness comes directly from Davies, who co-wrote the semi-autobiographical film with his brother Wale after working across journalism, fashion, commercials, and music videos. Much of his work has grown from wanting to see Black lives and communities represented with greater nuance, and for My Father’s Shadow, that search led him back to his own family history. He has said that if he only ever made one feature, he wanted it to serve his family and their memories. That personal starting point eventually carried the film to Cannes, where it became the first Nigerian film in the festival’s official selection and received the Caméra d’Or Special Distinction.
Family memory also sits at the centre of Beth de Araújo’s Josephine (2026), although here it begins with something much darker. The film follows an eight-year-old girl who witnesses a sexual assault and struggles to understand what she has seen, especially as the adults around her fail to give her the answers she is looking for. Most of us can probably remember a moment from childhood when we first realised that the world was not quite as safe as we had thought. For Josephine, that realization comes far too early and in the most brutal way possible, while a new sense of fear slowly begins to shape how she reads other people, her surroundings and her own vulnerability. The park is still the same park, the people around her are still the same people, yet her sense of safety is not.
De Araújo can stay unusually close to that shift because parts of Josephine come from her own childhood. She witnessed an incident in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that followed her into adulthood, later connecting the experience to the hypervigilance and paranoia she continued to carry years afterwards. Following her unsettling debut, Soft & Quiet (2022), she returned to that memory for her second feature. Barker, Parsons and Davies arrive there through completely different subjects, yet the connection between them becomes clear. None of them needs to invent the world at the centre of their film from scratch. In one way or another, they have already lived inside it.
Growing up surrounded by images has made visual literacy almost ordinary, with generative AI only pushing this development further. Give it a reference, a mood and a few keywords, and it can produce something surprisingly convincing within seconds. At least, that is what it promises. We have become so used to recognising, borrowing and recreating aesthetics that a good-looking image alone hardly guarantees we will remember it. When the next one is already waiting for us just below it on the feed, making us stop is only half the job. Giving us a reason to stay becomes much harder.
Who manages to keep our attention in the end is not necessarily a question of age. Someone who has spent decades making films has watched cultural shifts arrive, disappear and eventually return in another form, while someone at the beginning of their career encounters the present before its meaning has fully settled. One brings the distance of having seen things come and go, the other the immediacy of living through them right now, and cinema is better off with both in the room. Perhaps, then, all those Creative Directors and artists in our Instagram bios were never really the issue. The more people get to make and share their work, the more interesting the question becomes of who can make us stay with it.
A younger generation, at least, has had plenty of practice watching attention disappear. We know when something drags, when we are tempted to reach for our phone and how quickly one boring minute can send our mind somewhere else. Cinema runs on a different clock, though. Getting someone to stop scrolling for three seconds is one thing, but keeping them in their seat for two hours means giving a story somewhere to go, characters we want to follow and enough tension to make checking our phone feel like the less interesting option. All those hours spent online might have taught us quite a lot about catching attention after all, even if holding onto it is another matter. A generation so often accused of having lost its attention span might just be producing some of the filmmakers who know how to win it back.