Piercing Brightness is a science-fiction feature film written and directed by internationally acclaimed artist Shezad Dawood. The film entirely set in and around Preston UK, looks to play on the border between narrative and experimental film-making, using the materiality of film itself to reflect on time, memory, race and political agency. Working between different formats & refilmed 'film' to produce a palette of light and colour effects to tell a story through both narrative & implication/time distortion, while at the same time looking at a history of experimental film effects being used in mainstream popular science-fiction.

The plot revolves around a young Chinese boy and girl who appear after we witness a space craft-like form landing. Slowly it emerges they are representatives of another race which, in point of fact, has been visiting the Earth for millennia and from whom perhaps we all originate.

The whole story plays out against a background of the various public and civic institutions of Preston, and with ‘documentary’ elements that point to Preston’s radical political history and to Lancashire’s position as having the highest UFO sighting rate in the UK. Finally after opening up to the new associates they have befriended, there is a final show-down with hidden forces resident in the town, after which nothing will ever be the same again.