Jessie Buckley and Gwendoline Christie Headline a Buoyant BFI & Chanel Filmmakers Awards

Oscar-winning actress Jessie Buckley and Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie handed out this year’s BFI & Chanel Filmmaker Awards during an opulent ceremony at London’s Claridge’s Hotel on Wednesday.

The actresses served on this year’s jury alongside existing members Edward Enninful, ex-editor-in-chief of British Vogue and co-founder of EE72, as well as Marie-Louise Khondji, founder of Le Cinéma Club, and BFI CEO Ben Roberts.

Together, they selected four emerging U.K. filmmakers as the winners of the 2026 awards, including director, producer and cinematographer Rich Felgate (We, The Hated), director-writer Olive Nwosu (Lady), director and co-writer of Ish, Imran Perretta, and Something Familiar‘s director-writer Rachel Taparjan.

Each of the four award winners will receive financial support of £20,000 ($26,520), which will enable them to expand their work, explore new ideas, and “widen the representation of voices in today’s cultural community.”

Irish star Buckley said the jury members were privy to “such a feast of very original, inspiring, and radical work.” Dressed in Chanel (of course), she beamed: “The future of U.K. independent filmmaking is bright indeed if we continue to support and champion filmmakers such as Rich, Olive, Imran, and Rachel.”

The ceremony was a warm, high-spirited event, with each jury member inviting one winner up on stage to ask them about their films and creative process. The projects are varied: We, the Hated follows U.K. climate activist group Just Stop Oil; Nwosu’s Lady is a narrative piece about a fiercely independent female cab driver in Lagos, Nigeria; Perretta’s Ish is a drama about two childhood best friends torn apart by racial profiling and a traumatic police stop-and-search; and Taparjan stars in her own documentary as she helps to locate the birth mother of a woman adopted from the same Romanian orphanage as her.

Both Buckley and Christie spoke highly of the films, lauding the creatives’ “bold, visual sensibility” and “unshakable sense of responsibility to the communities” represented in the works.

The BFI & Chanel Filmmakers Awards support the BFI’s mission to back the next generation of U.K. independent filmmaking talent. The relationship between Chanel and film first started when Gabrielle Chanel travelled to Hollywood in 1930 to dress the leading actresses of the era and transformed them into style icons. Since 2022, Chanel has partnered with the BFI to hold the Filmmaker Awards.

Previous winners include Harry Lighton, who won in 2025 for Pillion, the BDSM comedy starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling. The feature went on to win a British Independent Film Award in the same year.

Among the other stars spotted by The Hollywood Reporter in attendance at Wednesday’s ceremony were Sebastian Croft, currently starring in the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors, married couple Douglas Booth and Bel Powley, 007 First Light‘s Patrick Gibson and Steve‘s Jay Lycurgo.