The film industry has spent the better part of a decade convincing itself that awards campaigns are a distribution strategy. John Malkovich put it plainly at a recent festival: Oscar campaigns are now the only reliable mechanism for getting audiences into cinemas. Jessie Buckley, speaking at the BFI and Chanel film-maker awards in London, agreed with the diagnosis while questioning the prescription. Buckley's position is structurally interesting precisely because she's made her career almost entirely in independent film. She isn't arguing from ignorance about the promotional machinery — she's arguing from experience of what exists outside it. Her point isn't that campaigns are cynical but that they've absorbed creative and institutional energy that used to flow toward development. The question she raises: what if the industry is funding the marketing of the last generation's films at the cost of producing the next generation's? The BFI and Chanel awards exist as a small, concrete answer to that question. Four emerging UK film-makers each received £20,000 to develop their work — a modest sum, but a real one. The jury included Buckley and Gwendoline Christie alongside BFI CEO Ben Roberts and former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful. The four winners announced at Claridge's were Rich Felgate (We, the Hated, a documentary about Just Stop Oil protesters), Olive Nwosu (Lady, a Lagos-set debut about a female taxi driver and her sex-worker friend), Imran Perretta (Ish, a black-and-white coming-of-age film about racial profiling in Luton), and Rachel Taparjan (Something Familiar, a documentary about her search for sisters after being adopted from Romania). The range is striking. These aren't safe festival bets — they're films about political polarisation, racial profiling in British South Asian communities, female labour in Lagos, and transnational adoption trauma. Buckley pointed specifically to low-budget films like Obsession and Backrooms as evidence that quality, not IP or prior brand recognition, is still capable of driving audiences. That's a harder argument to make in 2025 than it was in 2010, but the BFI awards at least gesture toward the structural conditions that would make it true. Buckley's comment about protest was the sharpest moment in her public remarks. Responding to We, the Hated, she said: 'In our world at the moment, protest seems like such a dangerous act, when historically it's been essential to democracy.' That's not a political endorsement of Just Stop Oil's tactics — it's a more precise observation about how the political and media environment has reframed civil disobedience as threat rather than tradition. That a documentary could 'realign' her thinking on this is itself an argument for the kind of film-making these awards are trying to sustain. The awards have run since 2022. Previous recipients include Harry Lighton, whose film Pillion won best British independent film at the BIFAs in 2025, and Savanah Leaf, who received the 2024 BAFTA for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer. That's a short but legible track record — the programme appears to be identifying film-makers before rather than after the market does. The structural argument Buckley is making — that the industry needs to invest earlier and more diffusely rather than concentrating resources on late-stage promotion — is not going to resolve the economics of theatrical distribution. But it names something real: the film industry, like most creative industries under platform pressure, has shifted its spending toward marketing existing work rather than generating new work. The BFI and Chanel awards represent £80,000 toward correcting that, which is small, but the direction is right.
