Film London today (Wednesday 7 January 2026) announces the six recipients of the 2025/26 FLAMIN Fellowship – the UK’s only training and bursary scheme dedicated to the next generation of artist filmmakers.

Offering early-career artist-filmmakers a unique programme of mentoring, funding and support to develop a new moving image work, the FLAMIN Fellowship nurtures cutting-edge emerging talent and has proven increasingly important to the UK’s creative ecosystem. The FLAMIN Fellowship equips artists with industry knowledge and advice on sustaining a practice through a series of monthly workshops. Workshops are convened by industry-leading artists, previously including Larry Achiampong, Hetain Patel, Heather Phillipson, and Marianna Simnett.

Investing a total of £15,000 in artists' development bursaries, FLAMIN offers each artist £2,500, along with access to a series of monthly workshops and one-to-one guidance from an experienced Production Advisor.

The work of this year’s FLAMIN Fellows displays a wide range of approaches, including DIY audiovisual performance, archival documentary, animation and community filmmaking.

Alina Akbar is a filmmaker and storyteller working across moving image, photography and installation. Her practice is rooted in both the personal and collective experiences of people of colour, and is often developed through conversation and collaboration with her community and personal network.

Charlie Osborne is a Welsh artist based in London, who works across film, performance, writing, music and sculpture. Using structural systems similar to poetry, works are presented through sensations of a never-ending performance. The theatricality in her projects can be explained as an on-going circus patchwork of pain, where muggy misfits cause circulation of hope, humour and magic.

Dino Zhang is an artist filmmaker and researcher based in London and Shanghai. Employing an autoethnographic framework to retrace the past, he approaches his practice as inherently research-oriented, gathering cumulative materials and archives from his family and where he grew up. Through grieving, contemplating, and reconciliation with the contradictory discourses of the past, he examines socio-cultural history and how we can embody a burdened past.

Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan uses animation as an open space to bring combine a range of media including collage, music, documentary, poetry and live-action. Leaning into the accidental and unknown, he is interested in breaking the rules of animation and often draws upon discarded or unconventional materials, recently sticks, stones, walls, floors, street-signs, tape, and broken glass.

Guided by conversations and poetic gestures, Laisul Hoque’s practice explores autotheory through filmmaking and installation, with socially engaged modes of presentation that seek to uplift the individuals and communities connected to each project. Recent projects include a film that documents his mother’s first trip to London, made using a camera his father bought twenty years earlier to record his own journey through Europe.

Simon Hamlyn’s process-led approach to filmmaking utilises printmaking techniques to create hybrid analogue-digital experimental animated films. The common subject of his work involves exploring the complex mythologies behind our built environment, examining the stories and circumstances that underlie the spaces we inherit to re-present these moments in visceral animated vignettes. Hamlyn’s approach blends personal home-video aesthetics with surreal imagery, depicting the fluid and often unreliable nature of memory.

Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London, said: “The FLAMIN Fellowship champions and supports UK artists making some of the world’s most exciting moving image work: pieces that immerse, challenge, provoke and question, and that force us to examine aspects of society, culture, history and ourselves in ways that are by turns playful, bracing and, at times, discomfiting.

The work of the six artists selected for this year’s Fellowship is bold, brilliant and vital. At a point where issues like the power of art and the nature of human creativity are more hotly debated than ever before, we are proud to support such uniquely talented individuals.

Congratulations to this year’s cohort, and our thanks to Arts Council England for their vital support.”

In 2024-2025, work by artists supported through the FLAMIN Fellowship has been screened at major galleries, museums and festivals in the UK and internationally. Anna Engelhardt’s Terror Element (made in collaboration with Mark Cinkevich) showed as part of a group exhibition at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, and screened at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival and the Industrial Art Biennial. Deptford X presented a solo exhibition focused on Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting, a new film by Harmeet Rahal. Films by Ronan Mackenzie and Chris Childs received premieres at Indie Cork and London International Animation Festival, and Edd Carr, Adonia Bouchehri and Mahenderpal Sorya showcased work-in-progress at the BFI London Film Festival.

Previous speakers on The FLAMIN Fellowship workshop programme include artists Larry Achiampong, Noor Afshan Mirza&Brad Butler, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Morgan Quaintance, Hetain Patel, Imran Perretta, Heather Phillipson, Marianna Simnett and Rehana Zaman. Arts organisations including ACME Studios, Arts Council England, Artquest, Auguste Orts, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, BFI, CPH:DOX, DACS, Film and Video Umbrella, Forma, Jerwood Arts, LUX, Tate and Wellcome Trust have all contributed to the professional development arm of the scheme. Each of the FLAMIN Fellows is provided one-to-one guidance with Pinky Ghundale, who is producer to Turner Prize and Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen.

Established in 2017 by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and supported by Arts Council England and The Fenton Arts Trust, the Fellowship builds on FLAMIN’s successful work at the core of the UK’s moving image ecology. With a focus on early-career practitioners, The Fellowship complements FLAMIN’s wide-ranging programme supporting early, mid and later-career artists through FLAMIN Animations, FLAMIN Productions, the Film London Jarman Award and a range of significant development opportunities.

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