--- name: "Cate Shortland" canonical: "https://film.one/person/cate-shortland" roles: ["Director"] born: "10 August 1968" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "director" average_over: 1 updated: "2026-09-19T12:24:12.848437+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." --- # Cate Shortland Director. Born 10 August 1968 in Temora, New South Wales, Australia. ## Details - **Work:** Director - **Born:** 10 August 1968, Temora, New South Wales, Australia - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cate_Shortland, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q441510, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0795153/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/93286 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Black Widow*](https://film.one/film/black-widow.md) (63) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Cate Shortland > Cate Shortland makes close, quiet films about young women in trouble, and she is at her best when nobody is talking. Marvel borrowed that for a handful of scenes, then buried it under digital weather. The best scene in *Black Widow* (2021) is two women sitting on the floor of a Budapest flat after trying to kill each other. Shortland stages the fight at close quarters with curtains, a sink and a hob, Gabriel Beristain shoots it hand-held and near enough that we can see both women getting tired, and then it stops and they talk. Florence Pugh's Yelena says the Ohio years were real to her whatever they were to everyone else, and she says it as an accusation. We were caught off guard and moved. That is Shortland's habit: get people exhausted and near the ground, then wait. She came up through short films and television, including episodes of *The Secret Life of Us*, and her first feature, *Somersault* (2004), which she also wrote, was a coming-of-age story built out of close, sensory detail rather than plot. *Lore* (2012), which she co-wrote, followed children across Germany at the end of the war and trusted silence for long stretches; it is the film most people mean when they say her name. *Berlin Syndrome* (2017) took the same interest in a young woman under duress into a thriller about captivity. Then Scarlett Johansson asked her to direct a Marvel film. What she does well has not changed. Her women are flawed and allowed to stay so, and her images work through lighting, colour and a camera that stays on a face rather than through story. She has not kept a cinematographer, working once each with Robert Humphreys and Adam Arkapaw before Beristain, and the look has held anyway. She runs a set built for improvisation. Her own account of *Black Widow* was this: "What we tried to create on set was a safe space for the actors, so they could give as truthful a performance as they could, and so they could have fun together and do improvisation." You can see the result at the farmhouse table, where four agents who once pretended to be a family bicker like one. The weakness is the mirror of it. The complaint made against *Berlin Syndrome* was that the mood and the thriller never quite joined, and against *Lore* that the pictures could be so absorbing the horror behind them went soft. *Black Widow* has the trouble the other way round. The director of the Budapest floor is present for perhaps a third of it, and the villain at a desk and the last half hour could be anyone's. We scored it 63, and most of those points belong to Pugh and the kitchen. Since then she has gone back to television, on *Three Women* (2023) and *The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox* (2025), which may be the right size for her. The evidence so far is that the closer the camera and the smaller the space, the better she gets. Marvel gave her the biggest set in the business and she did her best work in its kitchen. ## Biography Cate Shortland is an Australian director and screenwriter. She was born on 10 August 1968 in Temora, New South Wales, and graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, where she received the Southern Star Award for most promising student. Shortland directed the feature films *Somersault* (2004), which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, *Lore* (2012) and *Berlin Syndrome* (2017). She also directed episodes of the television series *The Secret Life of Us* (2001–2003) and the 2021 Marvel Studios film *Black Widow*. *Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Black Widow* (2021), Fi1m 63, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/black-widow.md) ## Complete filmography (17) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox* (2025), series, Director - *Black Widow* (2021), Director — Fi1m 63, [page](https://film.one/film/black-widow.md) - *Berlin Syndrome* (2017), Director, Additional Writing - *The Kettering Incident* (2016), series, Writer - *Deadline Gallipoli* (2015), series, Writer - *Lore* (2012), Director, Screenplay - *The Slap* (2011), series, Writer - *Netherland Dwarf* (2008), Thanks - *The Silence* (2006), Director - *Somersault* (2004), Screenplay, Director - *Bad Cop, Bad Cop* (2002), series, Director - *The Secret Life of Us* (2001), series, Director - *Joy* (2000), Director, Writer - *Flowergirl* (1999), Director, Screenplay - *In the Winter Dark* (1998), Assistant Director Trainee - *Pentuphouse* (1998), Writer, Director - *Strap on Olympia* (1995), Director, Screenplay ## Gallery - ![Cate Shortland](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-6597ff1d199c.jpg) Cate Shortland — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Cate_Shortland_by_Gage_Skidmore_%28cropped%29.jpg/1280px-Cate_Shortland_by_Gage_Skidmore_%28cropped%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Director Cate Shortland presenting Berlin Syndrome at the Berlinale 2017](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-4e0778bde8e0.jpg) Director Cate Shortland presenting Berlin Syndrome at the Berlinale 2017 — Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Cate_Shortland_%28Berlin_Syndrome%2C_Berlinale_2017%29_%28cropped%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled) - ![Director Cate Shortland presenting Berlin Syndrome at the Berlinale 2017](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-8d19c1fae598.jpg) Director Cate Shortland presenting Berlin Syndrome at the Berlinale 2017 — Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/MJK34507_Cate_Shortland_%28Berlin_Syndrome%2C_Berlinale_2017%29.jpg/1280px-MJK34507_Cate_Shortland_%28Berlin_Syndrome%2C_Berlinale_2017%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Cate Shortland speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con International, for "Black Widow", at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Please at](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-cbf5839fed92.jpg) Cate Shortland speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con International, for "Black Widow", at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Please at — Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Cate_Shortland_%2848471773301%29.jpg/1280px-Cate_Shortland_%2848471773301%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Cate Shortland](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-f12c77437b00.jpg) Cate Shortland — Image via TMDB - ![Cate Shortland speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.](https://film.one/media/person/1075691/gallery-d687a4c06b06.jpg) Cate Shortland speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. — Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Cate_Shortland_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg/1280px-Cate_Shortland_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) --- © 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/cate-shortland