Film London has announced the four artists shortlisted for the 2026 Jarman Award, one of the UK’s most significant prizes for artist filmmakers.
Now in its nineteenth year, the award celebrates experimental moving image practices and honours the legacy of visionary artist, filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman. The winner will receive £10,000 and will be announced in London on 24 November 2026.
The 2026 shortlist brings together four artists whose work explores migration, identity, memory, labour, community and social structures through innovative approaches to filmmaking:
Alia Syed, Ilona Sagar, Sadia Pineda Hameed, Rhea Storr
Together, the shortlisted works move between personal histories and collective experiences, combining documentary footage, home movies, archival materials and experimental image-making to examine how stories are passed between generations and communities.
Among the selected works is Rhea Storr’s New Territories (spectacle is king), a silent meditation on carnival culture in Britain. By removing sound from scenes of colourful carnival processions, Storr shifts attention to the relationship between predominantly Black communities and the public spaces in which these celebrations unfold.
Sadia Pineda Hameed’s five-channel film Anak, Where Did We Stay? draws on family archives and personal footage to explore her mother’s journey from the Philippines to Britain. The work blends family history with wider narratives of migration, belonging and homemaking.
In a powerful examination of labour, health and bureaucracy, Ilona Sagar’s film investigates asbestos-related illness in Barking and Dagenham through collaborations with campaigners, healthcare professionals and support groups, exposing the often dehumanising systems surrounding compensation and care.
Meanwhile, Alia Syed’s The Ring in the Fish combines 16mm film, photography and oral histories to reflect on migration and imagination through stories from Glasgow families, interwoven with references to South Asian sporting traditions and local folklore.
Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London, said:
“Every year the Film London Jarman Award serves to thrill and inspire while also challenging us to reappraise our views and our understanding of the world around us. Between them Sadia, Ilona, Rhea and Alia blend the personal with the universal in unique and innovative ways, imbuing the commonplace with a sense of the extraordinary while skilfully unpicking some tremendously complex issues.”
The jury added:
“The shortlisted artists possess a confident and singular way of seeing the world, transporting the viewer through their compelling and elegantly crafted films. Their outstanding works are deeply grounded in lived experience and in-depth research. They present skilfully nuanced arguments, approaching their varied subject matters with poetic sensitivity and experimentation.”
Over the years, the Jarman Award has become a key barometer for emerging and established artist filmmakers in the UK. Previous shortlisted artists include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Monster Chetwynd, Heather Phillipson, Laure Prouvost and Sin Wai Kin, many of whom later went on to receive Turner Prize nominations and awards.
Ahead of the winner announcement, the shortlisted artists’ work will tour venues across the UK, including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Nottingham Contemporary, Spike Island and Barbican Centre.
The shortlisted artists’ work will also be presented in a dedicated exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery from 17th November to 13th December 2026.
MORE: filmlondon.org.uk/flamin/the-jarman-award
About the artist
Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist based in the Ebbw Valley, Wales, whose work explores ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using 16mm film and hi8 video, sculptural installation, text and performance, her work imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like. Her practice is led by a processes of associative journeying in resistance to Western historicisation and displacement; mythmaking, melodrama and decoy become playful devices to speak through a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge. She has shown with Iniva, Brent Biennial 2022, The Crypt Gallery and The Mosaic Rooms in London; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; The Box, Plymouth; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Tangent Projects, Barcelona; Zamek, Poznan; Mostyn, Llandudno; Glynn Vivian, Swansea; Chapter Arts Centre, g39 and Arcade/Campfa, Cardiff, amongst others. She was awarded the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Porthmeor Studio Residency 2026, Arts Council Wales Perspectives Fellowship 2024, British School at Rome Fellowship 2023, Freelands Fellowship 2022, Jerwood UNIT(e) Residency 2021 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists in 2021. Her films have been selected for Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2026, Wales One World Film Festival 2026, FOCUS Wales 2026 and Queer East Film Festival 2025.
Ilona Sagar is a London-based artist and filmmaker, and resident of Somerset House Studios. Drawing on archival research and interdisciplinary collaboration, her work explores how civic and social identities are constructed and contested through the infrastructures of health, technology, and the body. Recent projects include Other Actors (Stanley Picker Fellowship, 2025), currently touring to the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki, Nordic House Reykjavík and Röhsska Museum Gothenburg. Her work has been presented internationally in venues including the 24th International Exhibition at Triennale Milano, Serpentine Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Wellcome Collection, CCA Glasgow, Villa Arson Centre National d’Art Contemporain and Art Rotterdam. In 2027, she will undertake a collaborative research project with neurologists at King’s College London and the University of Eastern Finland in partnership with Saastamoinen Foundation. Forthcoming work includes projects with Cement Fields and a solo commission with public programme at Somerset House Studios.
Rhea Storr makes films that consider Black, mixed-race and diaspora cultures, including her own Bahamian-British ethnicity. She explores the in-between, translation, format and aesthetics that depict themes such as masquerade, the performances of Black women, community space, and racialised subjects in rural or public landscapes. She has a long-standing interest in the counter-cultural use of analogue film, embracing DIY practices and alternative spaces in order to depict Caribbean subjects who are themselves also marginalised. Storr was educated at Oxford University, RCA and Goldsmiths, University of London, where she completed her doctorate. Her research explores the intersection of Black identities and experimental filmmaking practices. Recent screenings and exhibitions include: MoMA Doc Fortnight; New York Film Festival; BFI London Film Festival; Berwick Film and Media Artist Festival; European Media Art Festival; Kassel Doc Fest and Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn. Exhibitions include – Artist Film International, Whitechapel Gallery; Bangkok Kunsthalle; Tate Lates; Somerset House; Lisson Gallery; National Museum for African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts; VIAD and Brown University and CIRCAxDAZED London, FotoMuseum. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020, the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize, the Royal Photographic Society Award for Creative Contribution to Art in Moving Image 2023, the Kodak Award at Hamburg International Film Festival 2025 and runner-up Best British Short at London Short Film Festival 2025. Rhea Storr’s New Territories (spectacle is king) is screening at the Barbican on August 16th, as part of the exhibition and film season Project A Black Planet.
Alia Syed was born in Swansea, and works between London and Glasgow. For over 40 years, she has made experimental films that disrupt traditional narrative structures to create complex explorations of migration and colonialism, identity and place. Her work navigates geography, memory, and the fragmented nature of diasporic identity. Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including, BBC Arts Online (currently), Tigers an Dragons: India and Wales in Britain (currently) Glynn Vivian; CCA Glasgow (2025); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Courtisane Festival, Belgium (2019); WKV, Stuttgart (2019); Yale Centre for British Art (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012-13), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006); Hayward Gallery, London (2005); Tate Britain, London (2003); Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland (2002); Iniva, London (2002); The New Art Gallery in Walsall (2002); and Tate Modern, London (2000). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi. She was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award in 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2020.
