--- name: "Alicia MacDonald" canonical: "https://film.one/person/alicia-macdonald" roles: ["Director"] reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "director" average_over: 1 updated: "2026-09-21T02:11:24.149212+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Alicia MacDonald Director. ## Details - **Work:** Director - **Elsewhere:** https://www.themoviedb.org/person/2243952 ## Fi1m on Alicia MacDonald > One feature in, Alicia MacDonald can make students sound like students and a city look lived in. *Finding Emily* (2026) shows a good ear and an easy hand with actors; what it does not show is the nerve to follow a question through. Somebody posts something, the phone is in the frame, and the joke lands before anyone has explained it. That is the thing Alicia MacDonald does best in *Finding Emily* (2026), her first feature, and it is rarer than it sounds. Most films with a group chat in them stop to read it out. MacDonald and her editor Phil Hignett keep going, and the students on screen talk the way students talk rather than the way a script imagines they do. She came to the feature slowly and by the usual route. Shorts and sketches through the middle of the last decade, *Otherwise Engaged* (2015), *Domestic Policy* (2016), *Taxing* (2017), *Bad News* (2018); then television from 2019, episodes of *Pure*, *Flack*, the second series of Stephen Merchant's *The Outlaws* (2022), *SisterS*, and work on Lena Dunham's *Too Much*; commercials alongside. Nearly all of it is comedy, and comedy that is meant to sting a little. We have not reviewed the television and will not judge it here, but it accounts for the ease of *Finding Emily*. This is a director used to getting honest performances out of comic actors, and it shows. What works in *Finding Emily* is the surface, in the best sense. MacDonald and her cinematographer Rachel Clark make Manchester look like somewhere a person might choose to be young, and Bobbie Cousins dresses the flats with clutter that looks accumulated rather than placed. The leads are likeable, the friends are funny, and for an hour we were simply enjoying ourselves, which is not a thing we say about many British romcoms. The film's inheritance is worn openly: Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner produce, and the boy-who-cannot-find-the-girl engine is as old as the genre. Two things give us pause, and both are matters of nerve. The first is small: the film reaches for a song every time a scene needs to feel like something, and by the end that has become a habit. The second is not. MacDonald has said she loved that the script "had something to say about what it is to be a romantic in this day and age and how complicated it is", and for two acts it does, raising a proper question about its own hero and letting his friends tell him to stop. Then Rachel Hirons's script and MacDonald's direction simply agree with him. We felt talked out of something. The cooler reviews in America have this as their objection, and on this point they have a case. So: a good ear, a warm eye, a director who can run a comic scene without fussing over it, and a film we would happily send anyone to who likes the genre. What we do not yet know is whether that last act was a debut playing safe or the director's own view. The second feature will tell us, and we want to see it. ## Biography Alicia MacDonald is a British director working in film, television and commercials. She began with short films including *Otherwise Engaged*, *Domestic Policy*, *Taxing* and *Bad News*, and sketches that combined satire with emotional depth. She has directed episodes of television series including *Pure* (2019) and *The Outlaws* series 2 (2022) for the BBC. She also worked on Lena Dunham’s *Too Much* for Netflix as 2nd unit director and co-executive producer. Her commercial work includes campaigns for brands such as TUI, which received recognition at the British Arrows Awards. MacDonald made her feature directorial debut with the romantic comedy *Finding Emily* (2026), produced by Working Title Films and Focus Features. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, lbbonline.com, comedy.co.uk.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Finding Emily* (2026), Fi1m 70, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/finding-emily.md) ## Complete filmography (5) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Finding Emily* (2026), Director — Fi1m 70, [page](https://film.one/film/finding-emily.md) - *Too Much* (2025), series, Director - *The Outlaws* (2021), series, Director - *Flack* (2019), series, Director - *Otherwise Engaged* (2015), Writer, Director --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/alicia-macdonald