Street Assist: Edinburgh After Dark
A 10-minute documentary about the volunteers who look after people on Edinburgh's streets at night.
The brief
Street Assist Edinburgh is a volunteer-led organisation supporting people across the city centre at night. The project started through Marketa's accounting work with the charity, and the more we learned about what their volunteers do, the more we wanted to film it. They needed a film that would raise awareness of that work, ready for a public screening. We didn't want to make an advert. We wanted to show what actually happens on a night shift: the funny moments, the difficult ones, the weird conversations, and a lot of patience and kindness.
What we did
We filmed across the city centre during live night shifts over three months, following volunteers through real situations as they happened. Nothing was staged.
Filming at night brings its own problems. Crowds are unpredictable, and the people Street Assist helps are often at their most vulnerable, so a big part of the job was working out what not to film. We protected people's privacy first and told the story through the volunteers.
It also showed us a side of Edinburgh most visitors never see. By day it's the fairy tale city, castle in the middle, history on every corner. At night, on the streets, it's a much harder place, and that contrast became the heart of the film.
The finished documentary was delivered two to three weeks after filming wrapped.
What came out of it
The film was screened at Edinburgh City Chambers to around 150 people, and it moved a lot of them to tears. It was then selected for the 13th NightPiece Film Festival in August 2026, and The New Current wrote about the film and how it came together.
