The Outrun

Nora Fingscheidt's The Outrun premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. It is the German director's third feature, after System Crasher (2019) and the Netflix English-language drama The Unforgivable (2021). Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay with Amy Liptrot, who adapted her own 2016 memoir of the same name, published by Canongate Books and winner of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing.

Saoirse Ronan, who plays the lead, also produced the film through her company Brouhaha Entertainment, alongside Liptrot and Fingscheidt. She has said in interviews that the project grew out of her own response to Liptrot's memoir, over years of partial preparation. The principal location was Liptrot's actual childhood farm on the Orkney island of Papa Westray, and the production employed locals in supporting roles and as crew during an unusually difficult winter shoot, in weather the film makes no attempt to hide.

Yunus Roy Imer, who had shot Fingscheidt's System Crasher, worked with deliberately variable light to match the seasonal weather of an Atlantic island. Paapa Essiedu, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves and Lauren Lyle make up the supporting cast. At the BIFA 2024 ceremony the film was nominated for Best British Independent Film, with several further nominations including Best Director and Best Actress for Ronan. Saoirse Ronan was widely tipped for an Oscar nomination, but the campaign did not carry through the season.