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An experimental feature film co-created by a collective of autistic artists, a queer biker romance, and a film about police corruption in India are the winners of this year’s BFI and Chanel film-maker awards.
The awards, which champion “creative audacity” and ambition, come with a £20,000 prize for the three sets of winners.
The first of these announced at an awards ceremony on Thursday were the Neurocultures Collective – made up of Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker – and artist and film-maker Steven Eastwood. Together they made The Stimming Pool, a docufiction film which explores a world shaped by neurodiverse perspectives, released to acclaim earlier this year.
The jury – made up of Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton, magazine editor Edward Enninful, and BFI chief executive Ben Roberts – praised the team for creating “something completely new, beautiful and educative without ever being patronising”.
The award comes as last week, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, whose new film Hamnet played at the London film festival, reflected on her career as a neurodivergent film-maker. “I think it’s a superpower,” she said, “I have an extreme sensitivity to dissonance”.
Meanwhile, film-maker Harry Lighton received the prize for his feature debut Pillion, which premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category, where it picked up the best screenplay award. The film about a BDSM relationship stars Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård, and is playing at the London film festival before being released in cinemas next month.
The jury described Pillion as “authoritative, fresh, English, quaint, and well-made, all while maintaining a vulnerable heart and radical in its absence of shame”.
Sandhya Suri received the final award for Santosh, which premiered in Cannes last year and was the UK’s official selection for the Oscars in 2024. The film follows a newly widowed woman who inherits her husband’s job as a police officer in rural northern India. The jury said it was impressed by the “confident and captivating direction of [Suri’s] script and complex characters”.
Swinton said: “Once again, a highlight of the year for my fellow jurors and I [sic]: a glimpse, not only of phenomenally impressive projects achieved, but, even more excitingly, of groundbreaking new voices proposing new perspectives that widen the cinematic landscape and promise enlightening and inventive horizons ahead.”
The BFI and Chanel film-maker awards have been running since 2022. Previous winners have included Kathryn Ferguson (Nothing Compares), Savannah Leaf (Earth Mama) and Pinny Grylls (Grand Theft Hamlet).
