Film London reveals the six recipients of the 2025/26 FLAMIN Fellowship.

Film London has announced the six recipients of the 2025/26 FLAMIN Fellowship – the UK’s only development and bursary scheme dedicated to the next generation of artist filmmakers.

Offering early-career artist-filmmakers a unique programme of mentoring, funding and support to develop a new moving-image work, the FLAMIN Fellowship nurtures cutting-edge emerging talent and has become increasingly important to the UK’s creative ecosystem. The FLAMIN Fellowship equips artists with industry knowledge and advice on sustaining a practice through a series of monthly workshops. Workshops are convened by industry-leading artists, previously including Larry Achiampong, Hetain Patel, Heather Phillipson, and Marianna Simnett.

Investing a total of £15,000 in artists’ development bursaries, FLAMIN offers each artist £2,500 and one-to-one guidance from an experienced Production Advisor.

The work of this year’s FLAMIN Fellows displays a wide range of approaches, including DIY audiovisual performance, archival documentary, animation and community filmmaking.

Alina Akbar is a filmmaker and storyteller working across moving image, photography and installation. Her practice is rooted in both the personal and collective experiences of people of colour, and is often developed through conversation and collaboration with her community and personal network.

Charlie Osborne is a Welsh artist based in London, who works across film, performance, writing, music and sculpture. Using structural systems similar to poetry, works are presented through sensations of a never-ending performance. The theatricality in her projects can be explained as an on-going circus patchwork of pain, where muggy misfits cause circulation of hope, humour and magic.

Dino Zhang is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in London and Shanghai. Employing an autoethnographic framework to retrace the past, he approaches his practice as inherently research-oriented, gathering cumulative materials and archives from his family and where he grew up. Through grieving, contemplating, and reconciliation with the contradictory discourses of the past, he examines socio-cultural history and how we can embody a burdened past.

Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan uses animation as an open space to combine a range of media, including collage, music, documentary, poetry and live-action. Leaning into the accidental and unknown, he is interested in breaking the rules of animation and often draws upon discarded or unconventional materials, sticks, stones, walls, floors, street-signs, tape, and broken glass.

Guided by conversations and poetic gestures, Laisul Hoque’s practice explores autotheory through filmmaking and installation, with socially engaged modes of presentation that seek to uplift the individuals and communities connected to each project. Recent projects include a film that documents his mother’s first trip to London, made using a camera his father bought twenty years earlier to record his own journey through Europe.

Simon Hamlyn‘s process-led approach to filmmaking utilises printmaking techniques to create hybrid analogue-digital experimental animated films. The common subject of his work involves exploring the complex mythologies behind our built environment, examining the stories and circumstances that underlie the spaces we inherit to re-present these moments in visceral animated vignettes. Hamlyn’s approach blends personal home-video aesthetics with surreal imagery, depicting the fluid and often unreliable nature of memory.

“The FLAMIN Fellowship champions and supports UK artists making some of the world’s most exciting moving image work: pieces that immerse, challenge, provoke and question, and that force us to examine aspects of society, culture, history and ourselves in ways that are by turns playful, bracing and, at times, discomfiting.

“The work of the six artists selected for this year’s Fellowship is bold, brilliant and vital. At a point where issues like the power of art and the nature of human creativity are more hotly debated than ever before, we are proud to support such uniquely talented individuals.

“Congratulations to this year’s cohort, and our thanks to Arts Council England for their vital support.”

Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London,

In 2024-2025, work by artists supported through the FLAMIN Fellowship has been screened at major galleries, museums and festivals in the UK and internationally. Anna Engelhardt’s Terror Element (made in collaboration with Mark Cinkevich) showed as part of a group exhibition at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, and screened at festivals including the BFI London Film Festival and the Industrial Art Biennial. Deptford X presented a solo exhibition focused on Time Travelogues From Those Left Waiting, a new film by Harmeet Rahal. Films by Ronan Mackenzie and Chris Childs received premieres at Indie Cork and London International Animation Festival, and Edd Carr, Adonia Bouchehri and Mahenderpal Sorya showcased work-in-progress at the BFI London Film Festival.

Find out more about Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship: filmlondon.org.uk

About the artists

Alina Akbar is a visual artist and storyteller based in Manchester. Working in film, photography and installation her practice is rooted in the experience of both the personal and collective and is frequently developed through conversation, collaboration and being chronically online. Intuitively detangling the complexities of working class representation and issues of diversity which is amplified through her cinematic eye for capturing raw reality intertwined with poetic narratives. Akbar’s work bridges worlds that rarely meet, inviting audiences into her lived experience of class divide through street documentation and the archiving of cultural moments

Her work has been shown at The Whitworth Gallery, Touchstones Art Gallery, Harlesden High Street, Aviva Studios, V&A Museum late and her most recent film Pardesi Raga is a permanent part of Manchester Museums South Asia Gallery commissioned for the project space. The film was also part of the CIRCA Art Prize 2024 showing across London, Milan and Berlin. @lean0161

Charlie Osborne is an artist based in London, who works across video, performance, music and writing. Through fictioning and fracturing, Osborne’s projects share clues to an aftermath. Using structure systems similar to poetry, works are presented through sensations of a never-ending-performance. Characters are charged with a distorted sense of familiarity whereby theatricality within the hyper-real comes into play. Stylistically, Osborne’s ideas collapses and collides genres: shock rock, rom-com, horror, musical. The performance dips into sentimentality only to coat it in sensationalism, using horror aesthetics as both styling and strategy. Construction—both literal and narrative—is central to the work. Charlie uses structure not as a container, but as a dramaturgical device: an ambitious, deliberately unstable plot that operates more like a vignette or a conspiracy theory. The piece becomes an essay-concert, part demonstration, part poetry-reading, part trailer, part pop-song. In essence, Osborne’s practice is a performance about performance—genre-swerving, self-aware, and suspicious of its own storytelling. It asks the viewer to surrender to confusion, longing, recognition, and discomfort—all at once.

Osborne (b. 1999, Cardiff) graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts in 2021. Previous exhibitions include ‘In the offing’ (edited by and featuring Mark Leckey) at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2023); ‘Not long but very good’ at Matts Gallery, London (2022); ‘Dreamlands Part 1’ at OHSH Gallery, London (2022); and exhibited films in festivals such as London Short Film Festival (2022,2023), BFI Film Festival (2023), and Swedenborg House Film Festival (2023). Between 2022-2023 Osborne undertook a residency with Conditions/ICA studio programme, which culminated in a recent screening of a video work at the ICA, London (2024) and BFI, London (2024) featuring Mark Leckey. Charlie has recently been touring performance work at MOFO Festival, Paris (2025), ALICE, Copenhagen (2025), ICA, London (2025) and most recently at The Saatchi Yates at Marina Abramovic’s opening, London (2025.) @charlieosborne.xyz/

Dino Zhang is an artist filmmaker and researcher based in London and Shanghai. His practice weaves together threads of memory, history, and identity. Through grieving, contemplating, and reconciliation with the contradictory discourses of the past, he seeks heterochronic narratives that connect us to the field of socio-cultural history. Often taking the form of expanded cinema, his works move from a mode of thought and lyricism to a mode of resilience, stretching beyond the expanding landscape of archival imagery.

His works have recently been presented at TANK Shanghai; Beijing International Short Film Festival 2023&2024; HOME, Manchester; Slow Film Festival 2024, London; The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London. @dino0zhang

Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan is a filmmaker and artist based in Hastings, East Sussex. Behnan’s current creative practice is driven through the medium of animation. His animation style is unpolished and borrows largely from Assemblage where found materials like sticks, stones, vinyl records, archive footage, used-paper and broken glass are combined with his photographs and drawings. Behnan’s themes are personal and often have a documentary element, he spends a lot of his time in charity shops and going for walks. His work is influenced by the things he sees, hears and finds.

Behnan has previously been nominated for a British Animation Award, his work has been Archived in the BFI’s National Collection, his films have been screened internationally at festivals including; Animafest Zagreb, Edinburgh International Film Festival and New Chitose Airport International Festival. @jordanbehnan

Laisul Hoque (b. 1998, Dhaka, Bangladesh) is a London-based artist whose work explores social, personal, and familial histories. His installations and films are informed by intimate conversations and created in collaboration with communities connected to these narratives, forming an experiential autobiography that opens into a wider collective story.

After studying literature in Dhaka, he completed an MA in Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. His work has been shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican Centre, Experimenta India, and Alliance Française de Dhaka. He was a finalist for the 2024 CIRCA Prize and is the winner of the 2025 East London Art Prize. @laisulhoque/

Simon Hamlyn is an artist-animator based in Bristol whose work is underpinned by experimental approaches and process-led exploration. He has taken particular interest in configuring various printmaking techniques for animation – developing hybrid processes which make viable new ways of working. With an interest in exploring themes around social history, he is fascinated by the complex mythologies behind our built environment. ?

For his film Green Lung (2024), he received the ASIFA International 65th Anniversary Best Non-Narrative Award at Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2025 and has screened his work internationally in festivals such as: ITFS Stuttgart, Germany; Cinanima, Portugal; Anifilm, Czechia; Viborg, Denmark; Animator, Poland; Anibar, Kosovo and Flatpack Festival in Birmingham. @simon.hamlyn/

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