BFI and Chanel filmmaker awards selects 2025 winners

Pillion filmmaker Harry Lighton, The Stimming Pool creators The Neurocultures Collective and Steven Eastwood, and Santosh writer-director Sandhya Suri are the winners of the fourth BFI and Chanel filmmaker awards.

The awards aim to champion creative audacity and ambition and come with a £20,000 prize for the three sets of winners.

Screen Star of Tomorrow 2018 Lighton’s queer biker romance Pillion world premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard, where it picked up the best screenplay award. Harry Melling and Peter Skarsgard star, with the film also playing at Telluride and the BFI London Film Festival, with Picturehouse releasing in UK-Ireland on November 28, and A24 releasing the title in the US. The jury described Lighton’s feature debut as “authoritative, fresh, English, quaint, and well-made, all while maintaining a vulnerable heart and radical in its absence of shame”.

The Stimming Pool is an experimental hybrid feature film, co-created by a collective of autistic artists, the Neurocultures Collective, and Island filmmaker Eastwood, and designed to explore a world shaped by neurodiverse perspectives. The jury praised the team for creating “something completely new, beautiful and educative without ever being patronising”. The film world premiered at CPH:DOX in 2024, before playing at last year’s BFI London Film Festival. 


Suri, a Screen Star of Tomorrow 2023, receives the award for her fiction debut feature Santosh, which world premiered at Cannes in 2024 and follows a newly-widowed woman who inherits her husband’s job as a police officer in rural northern India. The jury was impressed by the “confident and captivating direction of her script of complex characters”.

Tilda Swinton, a BFI fellow and Chanel ambassador, presented the winning filmmakers with their awards alongside members of the jury Edward Enninful, former editor of British Vogue and co-founder of media and entertainment company EE72, and BFI chief executive Ben Roberts.

Last year’s winners were Hoard director Luna Carmoon, Grand Theft Hamlet co-director Pinny Grylls and In Camera filmmaker Naqqash Khalid.

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