2026 Shortlist announced for the Film London Jarman Award

 In New Territories (spectacle is king), Rhea Storr presents a silent tableau that takes us to a summer of carnivals held in cities across the UK. With the sound muted, attention shifts to the striking contrast between the extravagant costumes of the participants and the mundane background of British high streets, parks and monuments, as the work explores the implications of a largely black community creating a spectacle for predominantly white consumption.
 
Artist Sadia Pineda Hameed brings together personal and archival footage and her parent’s home movies in her witty, playful five-channel film, Anak, Where Did We Stay?, telling the story of the artist’s mother’s migration from the Philippines to the British Isles. The film becomes a gathering site for personal and collective experiences of journeys - family collections, Beatlemania, a basking shark, lapping waves and an Enoch Powell protest are interspersed with pictures of road trips, as time converges to tell the story of migration from one archipelago to another. The film that emerges is an intuitive narrative of the unrecorded experience of arrival, homemaking and survival through community and joy, anchored by a conversation with the artist’s mother in her living room.
 
Barking and Dagenham’s high level of asbestos and mesothelioma related illnesses are examined in a deeply affecting film by Ilona Sagar that was made in collaboration with the London Asbestos Support Awareness Group, social workers, end-of-life carers, asbestos removal experts, campaigners, and legal and medical professionals. The film shows the processes of claiming compensation for work-related illnesses, including the indignity of having your ‘usefulness’ measured and assessed for a claim, body part by body part. Footage of a lung operation and wide shots of the industrial landscape of Barking and Dagenham are collaged between interviews as we see how Work Capability Assessments and legal statistical measurements have become controls by which the individual can be mediated, chained to notions of usefulness that frame the value of economic and domestic labour.

Drawing inspiration from the tale of St. Mungo, patron saint and founder of Glasgow, Alia Syed’s The Ring in the Fish combines 16mm vignettes, alongside photographs and audio interviews, exploring the role imagination holds in migration. Drawing on abstracted imagery and sounds from Kabaddi - a high-energy team sport originating in South Asia – Syed presents this alongside stories from Glasgow families the Sharifs and Shahids, reflecting on their earliest memories of wonder and confusion at perceiving the grandeur of the Empire and the extraordinary journeys of their relatives.

From speculative works set in near-future Wales to the legacy of a disused Finnish sanatorium built in the 1920s, films by the 2026 Film London Jarman Award shortlist raise questions about society, challenging us in both form and content, and transporting audiences from the everyday in order to see the lives of others and the world we live in differently.

Now in its nineteenth year, the Jarman Award has built an enviable reputation for celebrating the practices of ground-breaking artist filmmakers working in the UK. Previously shortlisted artists include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oreet Ashery, Duncan Campbell, Monster Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Imran Perretta, Heather Phillipson, Charlie Prodger, Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price, James Richards, Sin Wai Kin and Project Art Works all of whom went on to be shortlisted for or to win the Turner Prize.