Sex Education and Skins director Dominic Leclerc on his Northern Youth season at Bradford's Pictureville cinema

Dominic, who has been behind the lens on major TV productions like Shameless, Skins and Sex Education, has now curated a special season at the venue, Northern Youth, celebrating the city being one of the UK's youngest and showcasing films made in Yorkshire and surrounding regions.

The programme starts tonight with Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, before Shane Meadows’ This Is England is screened tomorrow and Shipley-born Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner on Sunday. Coming up next week, on Friday is Paweł Pawlikowski’s Yorkshire-based drama My Summer of Love, before Damien O'Donnell’s East is East on Saturday, Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes on the Sunday – with an introduction by cast member Tina Malone – and on June 13 is Anton Corbijn’s Control, the biopic of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, portrayed by Menston’s own Sam Riley.

Dominic, who lives in Bierley, is proudly “Bradford born, raised and based”. His identity is tied to the West Yorkshire city, a place he considers “punky, poetic and passionate”, or perhaps “maverick” and “from the fringe,” he says.

“The way it sits in a basin, it's very filmic but it has ar sort of aching beauty and poetry at its heart, and the passion that goes through the city. "True Bradfordians know that mixture of the urban and the edge and the poetry and the feelings I discovered quite young, they took me towards an industry about stories and about expressing humanity on screen." Dominic performed ballet, contemporary dance and tap from the ages of four to 16 but went on to read English Literature at Warwick University, which gave him a chance to direct theatre at the Warwick Arts Centre. He directed a show called Insomnia - he still struggles to sleep - which went to the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough in 2000. "I sort of discovered I was a director in this rehearsal room when I was directing the show - a road to Damascus moment. I knew, it was like a lightning bolt, 'this is what I'm meant to do with my life', and almost dedicated my life to it in that heartbeat." People from the National Theatre spotted his work and he went down to London, where he was a theatre and choreographer working with various venues.

His work in short films – he is still known for Protect Me from What I Want in 2009 - was also noticed, leading to directing roles on Shameless and Skins, and he was soon back in the north.

“We were bringing new faces to the screen and that really excited me,” he says. “Because I did quite a lot of those shows, it allowed me to fly as a director as well and take risks and move from being a theatre director to actually thinking through the lens. And I fell in love with the lens and screen acting, and the cinematic viewpoint.”

The work of late Leeds screenwriter Kay Mellor, with whom he collaborated, was a major inspiration. In particular Band of Gold, her 1990s ITV drama about sex workers in Bradford, made an impression.

"Previously, they've been relegated to the fringe of other people's stories and often murdered and plot fodder to further on maybe a straight white male protagonist’s story,” he says of the show’s characters. “To take these incredible women and place them centre stage and make them complex, funny, rich, emotionally nuanced – and the writing, to mix the drama and the comedy that Kay does so well – was really revelatory to me.

“But in a way, because I was early teens, it is only with hindsight that you look back and go it’s (about) the act of representation, of flipping narratives, of changing people's perceptions of minorities and outsiders. I'm a queer filmmaker, and actually seeing communities represented on screen is so important. Likewise, Queer as Folk (based around Manchester’s Canal Street) was an important moment.”

Dominic directed episodes of Love, Lies and Records, Girlfriends and The Syndicate, all shows created by Mellor, who died aged 71 in 2022.

"Kay was a massive part of my life, a real cultural linchpin, and it was probably the closest creative relationship I had. I miss her tremendously.

"She was such good fun and very generous but her writing, every part of it, came from truth and from authenticity. She turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. Everyday folk, often with strong female characters at their heart, but expressing the Olympian realms of the human heart in terms of how extraordinary we are as people. Even if we're from a poorer community, we might not have a lot of money, and we're struggling to get by, but actually what makes us human, our feelings, our courage, our compassion, our empathy, our capacity to love, to hurt - the whole realm of experience that she was exploring in her characters - was just so nourishing and interesting to me.”

Netflix teen comedy Sex Education, which starred former University of Leeds student Emma Mackey, is one of the biggest shows of recent years and Dominic directed three episodes of the fourth and final series, which came out in 2023. He was also key to the design of the show’s new Cavendish College set after the closure of the fictional Moordale Secondary School.

Dominic says: "The idea for it was a rallying call into the future, this sort of progressive college. So my concept of it was a West Coast facility with that Frank Lloyd Wright sort of architecture and playing with brutalist architecture, but what I would call retro futurism. Rooted in the 70s and 80s but shouting out to the future,” he says.

"Into that I brought both my queer aesthetics and my Yorkshire aesthetics,” he says – the entire colour palette of the college, he says, is Bradford-born David Hockney’s, while elements are also inspired by Barbara Hepworth and the Hepworth gallery at Wakefield.

"So although I was filming in Newport, Cardiff and Bristol, I brought some Yorkshire into that.”

Naturally, it had to be that way too for his programme at Pictureville – his favourite cinema. “To get to programme this season for them, it's been really joyous.”

For full details of the programme, visit: www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/cinema/northern-youth