Kevin Hartford is a Canadian film director from Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose debut feature film Lemon Squeezy was released in 2022. [1]
Hartford began making short films in 2016, [2] with his film Breakout receiving a Screen Nova Scotia award nomination for Best Short Film in 2022. [3]
He made Lemon Squeezy, a comedy film about a gay teenager who fears he may have triggered the apocalypse when he turns to religion after being rejected for a date, as an independent microbudget film after having difficulty securing production funding. [4] The film debuted at the 2022 Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and had its Canadian premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival. [2] The film was a nominee for Best Picture at the 2023 Screen Nova Scotia Awards. [5]
He returned to the 2023 Atlantic International Film Festival with Slay, a short film which he says he made without ever realizing that the character's sexual orientation never actually comes up in dialogue. According to Hartford, "hopefully, this is a sign that we’ve advanced enough as a society that even I, as a gay filmmaker, very intentionally making a gay short, unwittingly considered the character’s orientation so irrelevant to just telling a good story that I neglected even to bring it up onscreen." [6]
His second feature film, To the Moon , premiered at the 2024 Atlantic International Film Festival. [7]