Chloe Leigh King – 2026 Short Film Script Winner
Smokeshow
A filmmaker contends with recreating a scene that depicts her own sexual assault.
Chloe Leigh King is a director, writer, and actor whose work pushes her audience with unrelenting guile and intentionally straddled boundaries to engage with the unspoken, subconscious perversions that make us human. SMOKESHOW is a meta-reflexive short that explores what it means to portray sexual assault on screen. It’s a piece about process, memory, and exploring the multitude of selves that meet and converge when creating a personal work of art.
SMOKESHOW is based on a lived experience of sexual assault that occured in Chloe’s early 20s. She’d written the story in different mediums: journal entries, poetry, prose, in attempts to figure out how it needed to be shared with the world. When she began to sketch out how to tell the story on film, the images of the actual assault were so punishing that it made her feel uneasy. She wasn’t sure if sharing the visuals of the actual event was the right methodology into exploring the emotionality of the experience. What did it mean to add other images of violence against women into the cultural zeitgeist? And why? SMOKESHOW temporarily went on ice.
Chloe worked on other pieces, including another short that ultimately went on to screen at Sundance. The catharsis of creating this story, also personal in nature, was deeply healing. It provided an invigorated sense of artistic clarity. She realized that making a film about what it means to make a film was her way into SMOKESHOW. Picking the truth apart, reinterpreting it, reimagining it, assessing what it means to portray it – a process openly shared with the viewer. She cites Joanna Hogg’s revelatory THE SOUVENIR: PART II and the incredible Michaela Coel’s I MAY DESTROY YOU as sources of not only inspiration, but affirmation in the necessity of works like this. The uncomfortable, complex, haunting nature of survivorship, laid bare.
Her films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, Woodstock Film Festival, Dances With Films, and Beverly Hills Film Festival. Her scripts have been finalists in Manchester Film Screenplay Competition and Almanack Writers Colony. She is currently developing her first feature film.
Contact Chloe Leigh King:
Meet More Winners Submit Your Script