[The shortlists can be found here.]
MONOGRAPH
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Winner
Panel comments:
"Choi explores girlhood in South Korean cinema with supreme skill in argumentation and great clarity of writing. Not only does it challenge male-centred scholarship on East Asian cinema, its critiques of the use of girlhood and of girls and young women offers lessons for all readers. It is hugely readable, vitally important, wonderfully constructed and lastingly relevant." |
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Runner-up
Panel comments:
"So aptly titled, this book looks forward to seek paths to generate new insights. It teases out new framings, explores new ideas and does something risky in the context of a terrain that may be familiar, but is looked at anew. It will be much read and re-read." |
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Honourable mention (joint)
Panel comments:
"An insightful account of British film censorship at the local level, an area of study hitherto overshadowed by a narrative of national decision making, that shows how communities used their autonomy to help shape the reception of British cinema." |
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Honourable mention (joint)
Panel comments:
"Mixed Realities looks beyond the heteronormative properties that have typically attended evolving technologies to look at the broader experiences of gender and sexuality. This is a timely study on how these technologies can be harnessed to create a more equitable world." |
FIRST MONOGRAPH
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Winner
Panel comments:
"This study brings French queer film studies into view in an entertaining writing style, even with its complex network of theories. It balances intellectual rigour with clarity and engagement and provides a useful intervention to thinkings of queer space and cinema." |
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Runner-up
Panel comments:
"Grounded in extensive ethnographic research, this study offers innovative thinking on (Chinese) networks of distribution and exhibition. It is accessibly written, making complex ideas clear and engaging and offers new perspectives that challenge assumptions about cinema as practice and as theorized." |
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Honourable mention
Panel comments:
"This book proposes that moving images themselves are animate beings, reshaping how we understand visual media. By addressing ecological anxieties, it opens new pathways for film and eco-criticism." |
EDITED VOLUME
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Winner
Panel comments:
"This book boldly extends the idea of political film and television into the unexpected, and yet immediately convincing, realm of children’s programming. Far from exhausting its topic the extensive range of contributions establishes the importance of radicalism as a key term for future investigation of children’s film and television production." |
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Runner-up
Panel comments:
"This historically and theoretically informed collection establishes a topic of literally elemental importance that interweaves the art of film with contexts that span global modernity, indigenous knowledges, and climate emergency. In so doing, it brings attention to the at once luminous and material nature of cinema itself." |
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Honourable mention
Panel comments:
"A rehistoricization of early popular visual culture which overturns the hierarchies of colonial relations in the British Empire, reclaiming a diversity of practices of production and exhibition. It helps restore agency to historical subjects who existed not only in relations of domination but also of active negotiation." |
JOURNAL ARTICLE / CHAPTER
Winner
- Jiří Anger, ‘Archiving the live music spectacle: Woodstock ’99 and MTV pay-per-view’ (Screen, 66:2, 2025)
Panel comments:
"Anger’s astute analysis of Woodstock’s myth across live footage and documentaries deftly traces pay-per-view’s transformation into bootlegs, reframing televisual immediacy and rethinking unstable media archives. An elegant and genuinely exciting contribution to the field."
"Anger’s astute analysis of Woodstock’s myth across live footage and documentaries deftly traces pay-per-view’s transformation into bootlegs, reframing televisual immediacy and rethinking unstable media archives. An elegant and genuinely exciting contribution to the field."
Runner-up
- Sarah Thomas, ‘“Somebodies” and “Nobodies”: Generative AI and Audiovisual Performer Labor’ (Velvet Light Trap, 94, 2024)
Panel comments:
"Thomas’ timely essay on AI-generated performance is a perceptive, humane and urgently relevant contribution. Focusing on understudied ‘journeyman’ actors, it exhibits real concern for those who register for the industry as ‘nobodies,’ rather than ‘somebodies.'"
"Thomas’ timely essay on AI-generated performance is a perceptive, humane and urgently relevant contribution. Focusing on understudied ‘journeyman’ actors, it exhibits real concern for those who register for the industry as ‘nobodies,’ rather than ‘somebodies.'"
Honourable mention
- Nina Willment & Jack Newsinger, ‘“It’s like sunk cost fallacy or something they call it”: The role of symbolic, social and economic capital in worker motivations for staying in the UK television production sector’ (Media, Culture and Society, 2025)
Panel comments:
"Drawing on chilling empirical data about worker perceptions of self-worth, Willment and Newsinger demonstrate the continuing relevance of interdisciplinary cultural capital analysis."
"Drawing on chilling empirical data about worker perceptions of self-worth, Willment and Newsinger demonstrate the continuing relevance of interdisciplinary cultural capital analysis."
ESSAY BY A DOCTORAL STUDENT
Winner
- Oliver Dixon, 'The Chronotopes of Radical Film: Collective Exhibition and the Social Practice of “Cinema Action”’ (Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Volume 14, 2025)
Panel comments:
"What distinguishes it above all others is its rare combination of archival research and oral histories with spatial–temporal theory, illuminating how collective exhibition shaped political experience and working-class solidarity. It makes a compelling case for reinstating Cinema Action within the historiography of British independent film while offering a transferable conceptual framework with clear relevance beyond its immediate subject."
"What distinguishes it above all others is its rare combination of archival research and oral histories with spatial–temporal theory, illuminating how collective exhibition shaped political experience and working-class solidarity. It makes a compelling case for reinstating Cinema Action within the historiography of British independent film while offering a transferable conceptual framework with clear relevance beyond its immediate subject."
Runner-up
- Betty Stojnic, 'Anime and Drone Warfare: Operational Images, Dissimulation, and Hypercinematism in A Farewell to Weapons’ (Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 16:1, 2024)
Panel comments:
"A sophisticated and timely intervention bringing drone theory into dialogue with anime studies and extending debates on operational images and nonhuman vision into Japanese animation. Its particular strength is the conceptual precision with which it synthesizes ‘dissimulation’ and Lamarre's ‘hypercinematism,’ demonstrating how form and philosophy converge in the animation of militarized perception."
"A sophisticated and timely intervention bringing drone theory into dialogue with anime studies and extending debates on operational images and nonhuman vision into Japanese animation. Its particular strength is the conceptual precision with which it synthesizes ‘dissimulation’ and Lamarre's ‘hypercinematism,’ demonstrating how form and philosophy converge in the animation of militarized perception."
Honourable mention
- Johnathan Ilott, ‘They raise demons and people die': Gothic, Cosy Crime and National Identity in The Pale Horse (2020)’ (Gothic Studies, 27:1, 2025)
Panel comments:
"A confident synthesis of crime fiction theory, folk horror scholarship, and contemporary debates around Brexit, decolonization, and cultural memory, positioning the series within urgent national conversations with clarity and purpose. Its contribution to adaptation studies and Gothic scholarship remains significant and timely."
"A confident synthesis of crime fiction theory, folk horror scholarship, and contemporary debates around Brexit, decolonization, and cultural memory, positioning the series within urgent national conversations with clarity and purpose. Its contribution to adaptation studies and Gothic scholarship remains significant and timely."
ESSAY BY AN UNDERGRADUATE OR MASTER'S STUDENT
Winner
- Eilish Campbell, ‘Intertwined Ontologies and the Digital Image in Abbas Kiarostami's 24 Frames’ (University of Cambridge)
Panel comments:
"This essay has exceptional theoretical assurance and handles a genuinely ambitious argument with clarity. Demonstrating outstanding command of Bazin, Manovich, Gunning, and Pethő, it offers a rigorously structured and sustained reading of 24 Frames as a meditation on digital ontology and cinematic illusion."
"This essay has exceptional theoretical assurance and handles a genuinely ambitious argument with clarity. Demonstrating outstanding command of Bazin, Manovich, Gunning, and Pethő, it offers a rigorously structured and sustained reading of 24 Frames as a meditation on digital ontology and cinematic illusion."
Runner-up
- Aaron Jagger, ‘Navigating In/Visible Transmasculinity in 1960s–1980s British Broadcasting: Steve and Stephen’ (University of Warwick)
Panel comments:
"This article is notable for its methodological confidence and the maturity with which it brings archival sensitivity into dialogue with trans studies scholarship. Its framing of visibility, mediation, and the ‘anarchive’ offers a nuanced intervention into the historiography of British broadcasting, moving valuably beyond recovery towards critical reflection on how transmasculinity is constructed and contained."
"This article is notable for its methodological confidence and the maturity with which it brings archival sensitivity into dialogue with trans studies scholarship. Its framing of visibility, mediation, and the ‘anarchive’ offers a nuanced intervention into the historiography of British broadcasting, moving valuably beyond recovery towards critical reflection on how transmasculinity is constructed and contained."
Honourable mention
- Thomas O'Brien, ‘How are animated representations of Zombies in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1997) and ParaNorman (2012) used to represent retribution against imperialist systems?’ (University of Southampton)
Panel comments:
"The focus on plasmaticness and zombification as meta-textual processes is particularly impressive, demonstrating a strong understanding of animation's ontological implications. The theory-heavy essay remains high-level, intellectually serious work with real analytical originality — more than worthy of commendation."
"The focus on plasmaticness and zombification as meta-textual processes is particularly impressive, demonstrating a strong understanding of animation's ontological implications. The theory-heavy essay remains high-level, intellectually serious work with real analytical originality — more than worthy of commendation."
Awards vector designed by Pramote Lertnitivanit (vecteezy.com)