Your finals were five years ago, and, birthed from the Cambridge crucible with nothing but reckless ambition, the clothes on your back and Daddy’s card, nowadays you’re probably slumming it as a countercultural poet or killing yourself in the City. Actually, yeah, you’re probably a banker - bad luck.

Interviewing the indie filmmakers, Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe, (preceded by their ‘shit-hot’, ‘next-big-thing’ blogosphere reputations) who did indeed evacuate Cambridge just five years ago, I’m irked by the feeling that I really should get the hell on with my life.

From Footlights smokers to a British Independent Film Award nomination, this has been some graduation, but on the subject of success, they remain reticent: ‘We’re still using the office stationery account to make DVDs’. Sharpe and Kingsley are in the midst of a self-made promotional campaign for their debut feature, Black Pond, a development of an ADC Lateshow written when they were freshers, which has garnered significant critical acclaim.

Inspired by an obscure blog story of ‘a man who secretly crept into people's gardens’, the film is an unsettling account of loneliness and mortality, in which comic dexterity rubs alongside the genuinely chilling. The much-admired Chris Langham makes a storming but controversial return to form after a lengthy and ignominious absence from the industry, as a laconic fiftysomething with deadpan delivery of which Leslie Nielsen would be proud. Simon Amstell, (another Cambridge grad) also ventures into films for the first time, and is – to quote the Telegraph – ‘solid gold’ as a disturbed therapist, turning his Buzzcocks wit to a piece of sinister absurdism which could have been plucked straight out of A Clockwork Orange.

With a background in music video direction for the likes of Fatboy Slim and Darwin Deez, one would expect Sharpe and Kingsley’s cinematography to be fairly slick, and with cutaway interviews and animated montages, Black Pond feels fresh; more art school than film school. ‘I don’t know if it’s changed now, but few people were making films at Cambridge - the most exciting stuff was happening with theatre and comedy’, recalls Kingsley. No, things haven’t changed much. Film is still a token creative artform among Cambridge students; in terms of production, it is almost untouched terrain outside of the Campus Moviefest. Whether budgeting concerns, or a touch of theatrical snobbery, are to blame, opportunities are evidently being missed.

As independent cinema emerges from the shadows, Sharpe and Kingsley are right on the pulse, negotiating the pre-production of a follow-up project they sheepishly describe as ‘quite ambitious’. ‘Basically, it might look very glamorous to have nice reviews of your film, but the pay-off’s a way away’, they say. Still, could be worse.