Six early-career artist-filmmakers have been selected for the fifth edition of Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship scheme, a development program offering mentoring and funding alongside access to audiences, curators and established artist advisors.
The FLAMIN Fellowship aims to support the most exciting, innovative and challenging moving image practices from filmmakers at the early stages of their careers. Investing £15,000 in artists’ development bursaries, each artist will receive seed finance of £2,500 to develop new work.
“Now in its fifth edition, The FLAMIN Fellowship is widely known for spotlighting new and exciting artists’ moving image talent with bold visions and diverse perspectives — attracting hundreds of applications. With our previous Fellows continuing to grow in recognition, it is vital that we support and nurture artistic exploration and discourse, providing opportunities to not only develop creative practice but to engage in critical professional and peer support,” said Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London and the British Film Commission. “I am thrilled to welcome this group of six very talented practitioners to be our next cohort and look forward to seeing the work they produce. I would like to extend my thanks to Arts Council England for their invaluable support of The Fellowship.”
The six selected artists employ a wide range of innovative and creative approaches to the moving image. This includes but is not limited to hand-drawn animation, inter-weaving personal footage with staged scenes, layering multimedia and combining dance and performance with poetry.
Projects supported through this round of The Fellowship explore a variety of topical themes and viewpoints, such as the liberating and confining effects that technologies can have on society and individuals, the notion and construct of Blackness through time and space, and investigating queer histories through the creation of game-like environments and characters. Other projects will explore how folklore traditions and ancient rituals speak to the tensions of our contemporary world such as post-industrialism and migration, and how memory loss can be presented through physical decay.
Selected from over 160 applications and assessed by a board comprising producers, artists and Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network, the selected artists are:
- Chris Childs (chrischildsanimation.cargo.site)
- Bo Choy (bochoy.com)
- Ben Dawson (bendawson.space)
- Asmaa Jama (beforewedisappear.co.uk)
- Ronan Mackenzie (ronanmackenziefilm.com)
- Tobi Onabolu
Three of these U.K. filmmakers are active in animation:
Christopher Childs is an animator and artist based in Bristol. His work has screened at events such as London Short Film Festival, Flatpack Festival and POFF Shorts. He has also curated animation screenings for The Barbican Centre and contributed articles for Talking Shorts Magazine and the Independent Cinema Office Blog. Commercially, he has worked for clients such as the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Centre, London.
Ben Dawson is a queer artist based in east London, working between digital and physical spaces using CGI animation, film making, printed matter and objects. Through his practice, he asks, “What does it mean to be human?” His work is a digital deep dive into mortality, asking the question of what it is to have a body, physically and digitally. He has an obsession for images that carry cultural narrative — cowboys, alchemists and queer bodies — which act as surrogates for world building-narrative questions. Since graduating from Kingston School of Art in 2020, Ben has shown at ArtSect Gallery, London and was featured with CIRCA at London’s Piccadilly Circus big screen.
Ronan Mackenzie is a filmmaker from Blackburn and a graduate of the Manchester School of Art. His debut short film Infinity screened at multiple film festivals and institutes in the U.K., including Aesthetica Film Festival (BAFTA qualifying) where he was nominated for the North Filmmaker award by the BFI. In addition, it screened at Push Festival at HOME in Manchester which showcased the ‘very best’ of emerging northern filmmaking talent. Mackenzie’s work has been connected with contemplative and surrealist cinema, exploring themes of memory and its eventual decay, familial relationships, death, identity and existentialism, drawing comparisons to Terence Davis, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Chris Marker, David Lynch, Laurie Anderson, Yuri Norstein and Jack Chambers.
Learn more about the FLAMIN Fellowship artists here.
Established in 2017 by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and supported by Arts Council England and established with support from The Fenton Arts Trust, the Fellowship builds on FLAMIN’s successful work at the core of the U.K.’s moving image ecology. With a focus on early-career practitioners, The Fellowship complements FLAMIN’s wide-ranging program supporting early, mid and later-career artists through FLAMIN Animations, FLAMIN Productions, the Film London Jarman Award and a range of significant development opportunities.
Alumni of the FLAMIN Fellowship include recent winner of awards at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and the Arts Foundation, Onyeka Igwe, as well as Ollie Dook, Jennifer Martin, Antonia Luxem and Max Colson, who have staged solo exhibitions at Humber Street Gallery, Hull; Turf Projects, Croydon; Well Projects, Margate and Vitrine, London, respectively.
