UK agency Christelle & Co successfully campaigned for all five Bafta-nominated documentaries
There is one UK awards campaigner who will be happy whatever the outcome, when the trophy for best documentary is presented at the Bafta Film Awards at London’s Royal Festival Hall this Sunday (February 22). Christelle Randall’s Christelle & Co campaigned on behalf of all five Bafta-nominated titles: Dogwoof’s 2000 Meters To Andriivka, Netflix’s Apocalypse In The Tropics, Cover-Up and The Perfect Neighbor, and Made In Copenhagen’s Mr Nobody Against Putin.
It’s a clean sweep for Christelle & Co-campaigned titles in the category – and the first time a single company has achieved this feat, reckons company founder Randall. “It’s been an extraordinary year,” she says. “This was an incredible result.”
Randall bills her company as a “boutique specialist agency” that works across documentary and scripted, and across awards, festivals and UK release campaigns – but with a special emphasis on films with a social conscience, and with awards campaigns that utilise her own publicity skills and those of her team. “We believe that strategic publicity is a key part of awards success,” says Randall.
The revenue yielded from the awards campaigning component of the business is “important”, she agrees. “A lot of the reasons for us growing as a team come from that. We work so hard in that season. Round one is just insane, as it is for everybody. We’ve taken on more work, we’ve had a fantastic collaboration with Netflix for the past three years, where we work on many of their docs.”
She also namechecks Dogwoof, Altitude and Zak Brilliant’s MetFilm as important long-term client relationships.
Randall points out that, for documentary, awards season begins in earnest earlier in the calendar, making planning and strategising, if not active campaigning, a year-round activity. Many documentary titles that end up in the awards conversation are launched at the Sundance Film Festival in January, while CPH: DOX in March and Sheffield DocFest in June are increasingly vital pit-stops for Christelle & Co.
“Sheffield is a good place to reach Ampas doc branch voters because a lot of them go there,” says Randall. “It’s a good place to start talking to people about films because it feels more informal. And before you’re in full throttle of the awards season, that’s where we get some of our best intelligence about future films.”
Battle for attention
This year’s Bafta Film Awards saw 61 films entered in the documentary category, and Christelle & Co. campaigned for 11 of them. Even now, with a smaller specialised chapter (for those with “specific documentary/non-fiction experience”) rather than the sprawling opt-in chapter of the past, getting the attention of voters is not easy.
For campaigners, the battle is to ensure that your clients’ titles are getting watched. That means building buzz in the crucial first-round voting window, stoking publicity opportunities, and voter outreach permitted within the narrow campaigning rules dictated by Bafta.
“Getting on to the longlist is the fight,” says Randall. There are only 10 slots for documentary features, unlike Oscar which has a shortlist of 15. A Bafta jury then whittles down the 10 longlisted titles to the five nominees, before all Bafta Film Awards voters pick the winner in the final round.
Randall feels that her company is able to give equal attention to all of the titles it’s working across, which this year also include Altitude’s The Voice Of Hind Rajab and Mubi’s It Was Just An Accident, nominated for the film not in the English language Bafta.
“Our job is to fight for all of them, and we do that,” she says. With the Bafta-nominated documentaries, “each one of our team has actively sought out more press opportunities for each of those five films, and we’ve worked hard these last few weeks to do that. I do think this year we’ve had very different films, and there’s a different strategy that you can apply for each of them.”
Randall is understandably cagey about discussing fees. “The budgets vary because you’ve got people with more-independent budgets, and others who have big budgets,” she explains. “And that applies also to what they throw behind a campaign, multiple visits, multiple events. For us, anything with a bigger budget, we have to put more people onto that. We’re a small but mighty team.”
Awards campaigners who spoke anonymously to Screen agreed that the specialised chapter came up with a stronger documentary longlist in 2026 than was seen in previous years, when celebrity biographical titles often dominated. With a strong longlist of credible titles, the jury’s task of picking nominees is made easier.
“We’ve seen the benefits of that change this year,” says Randall. “I know a lot of the US campaigners that we work with every year have been baffled at the Bafta choices [in the past] and have said it is like the wild west – films that have never previously featured in any awards conversation ending up on that longlist at the expense of stronger titles.
“This year is definitely a step in the right direction. And obviously, we’re happy because five of them are ours, but they’re all worthy. They all deserve that spot. They’re strong filmmakers, they’re brilliant documentaries, they’re important causes.”
The latter point speaks to Christelle & Co’s focus on films with – in Randall’s words – “a social conscience”.
“One of the proudest moments about any of the campaigns we do is if you’re also able to influence change,” she adds. “And with For Sama, yes, it had the awards acclaim…” – winning the documentary Bafta in 2020 – “…but also Afraa Hashem [civil rights campaigner featured in the film], her UK visa was fast-tracked as a result of the momentum behind the campaign.”
Strengthening the team
“I didn’t set out to start an agency,” says Randall, who began essentially as an independent film publicity consultant in April 2020, having previously worked for two decades variously at Premier Communications, Way To Blue, Organic, Freud Communications, Metrodome Distribution and eOne. However, she quickly brought in her former Premier colleague Natasha Malhotra to share the burden, and also began collaborating on awards campaigns with Nicole Warren.
Malhotra now serves as publicity director at Christelle & Co, and saw her role broaden after leading on Sundance Film Festival London in 2024 for Picturehouse, and when Randall stepped away for maternity leave in 2025. The pair is supported by six team members on fixed-term contracts, and others hired on to specific campaigns.
Malhotra now manages the publicity team, staffing and invoicing, shouldering much of the administrative burden to allow Randall to focus on strategic and client development. She has also driven release campaigns on bigger, non-documentary titles, working alongside Universal on The Brutalist, Anora and Hamnet.
“It’s been great to learn this and step into this role,” says Malhotra. “We take on passion projects and films that we love doing. These films are our babies. It’s rewarding to see each project gain the recognition it deserves, and contributing to conversations that help these films reach wider audiences.”
“We’ve evolved as a team,” says Randall, who adds that the company represented two films at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival – Sophie Heldman’s The Education Of Jane Cumming and Elle Sofe Henriksen’s Arru – and will be at Cannes this year.
“We’re in a position where we can invest in different things. We’ve got professional IT set up, we have graphic designers who work with us, we have HR support. It wasn’t like that two, three years ago. People say to me, ‘Oh, it must be hard running a business,’ but I don’t overthink it. Sometimes it feels like it’s just happening, but it seems to be working.”
No comments yet