FILM LONDON LODESTARS: Hetain Patel
"Hetain is a well-established, critically lauded artist filmmaker whose work is consistently strong."
Adrian Wootton OBE (Chief Executive, Film London)
Hetain Patel at Piccadilly Lights (CIRCA), photograph by Greta Hewison
Hetain Patel is the winner of the 2019 Film London Jarman Award. His films have been shown worldwide in galleries, theatres, and on iconic public screens including Piccadilly Circus, London and Times Square, New York.
Online, his videos and performances have been watched over 50 million times, including his 2013 TED talk ‘Who Am I? Think Again’, a funny and inventive exploration of how we form an identity.
In 2021 Patel declined a British Empire Medal, and launched his most recent short film Trinity, which continues to tour in galleries nationally as part of British Art Show 9, and was selected for BFI Flare Festival 2022.
As part of the Mayflower400 commemorations, Hetain has been working with a cast of 50 children and young people to make an ambitiously scaled dance film to be released this summer - inspired by the traditional dances of the Wampanoag Nation, this new dance puts forward a different approach to people and land, than the colonial history of the UK. Hetain is also in early development of his first feature film.
Hetain Patel on the set of Trinity (2021), photograph by Gabriel Tineo