1.4 Awards 2026
What’s standing out from the Longlist this year
Still from The Ordinary, The Periodic Fable by Olivia de Camps and SMUGGLER.
words by Isabella Bazoni
Since 2015, the 1.4 Awards have championed brilliant filmmaking, celebrating filmmakers pushing the craft forward through bold visuals and powerful storytelling. With a jury spanning commissioning editors, brands, labels, and cultural producers, the awards spotlight work that resonates across the industry and beyond, connecting with a global audience.
This year’s longlist gives a good sense of what’s happening in short-form right now. From minimal ideas to more ambitious executions, these are the films we kept thinking about after watching.
Novo Amor & Yvette Young, MONTY — Victor Nauwynck, Leo Villares, Picloc
Leo Villares and Victor Nauwynck are a London-based directing duo working across music videos and commercials. Their films—defined by surreal storyworlds, offbeat humour and kinetic visuals—have been recognised by UKMVA, Berlin Commercial Awards, PromoNews, Aesthetica and FilmQuest.
With Monty, a tragi-comic story of a man resurrecting his dog, they lean into their instinct for balancing absurdity with sincerity. Centred around a hand-animated puppet inspired by lo-fi 80s effects, the film unfolds on 16mm as a frenetic, emotional ride through an unlikely companionship.
The Ordinary, THE PERIODIC FABLE — Olivia de Camps, SMUGGLER
Olivia De Camps is part of a new generation of filmmakers reshaping visual storytelling through bold aesthetics and an emotionally grounded lens. Rooted in movement, stylisation and a documentary sensibility, her work often explores the nuances of womanhood across Latin America and the Caribbean.
A Dominican-American writer-director based in New York, her genre-blending approach moves fluidly between film, music and fashion. Her debut short CHICO VIRTUAL was acquired by HBO/MAX, while SIRENA went on to screen at Locarno, Aspen ShortFest, Palm Springs and HollyShorts, earning Best Narrative at NFFTY.
Alongside her narrative work, she has directed music videos for artists including Marina, Nathy Peluso and Yuna, as well as campaigns for Kim Shui and RUIBuilt—establishing a voice that feels both contemporary and culturally attuned.
San, 2 LATE 4 THIS — Micah Henry, K. Bray Jorstad, Vista Point Studios
Vancouver-based duo Micah Henry and K. Bray Jorstad approach 2 Late 4 This as a love story shaped by what remains. Because every love story, in some way, is a ghost story.
I Hate Helen — Katie Lambert, Stink
Katie Lambert’s work centres on bold, character-driven storytelling, often grounded in the awkward truths of adolescence. Known for her sensitive direction of young performers, she draws out performances that feel both specific and deeply human.
Alongside her award-winning narrative work, she has collaborated with brands including LEGO, Marriott, Arsenal and Hornbach.
Man About Town, BEAUTIFUL THING — Kai Cem Narin, Rosco Production
Kai Cem Narin is a London-based photographer and director known for cinematic imagery and a refined sense of atmosphere. With a background in lighting for Mert & Marcus, his work is defined by a precise command of light and an intimate, fashion-led approach to storytelling. He has collaborated with Mission Magazine, Twin Magazine, Rains and Lancôme, emerging as a distinct voice in contemporary image-making.
Beautiful Thing unfolds as a fashion film centred on friendship, brotherhood and a quiet, evolving love. Through movement and gesture, it explores intimacy between men—tenderness, loyalty and connection—grounded in a specific cultural context and shaped by a sense of pride and unity.
Shot on 35mm, the film embraces texture and imperfection, lending weight and honesty to its images. The camera remains observant rather than performative, capturing moments of closeness and unspoken bonds, where fashion becomes a language for identity, belonging and desire.
Sam Browne, JUST A BOY — Edie Amos, After Party Studios
Edie Amos is a director drawn to stories of connection, with a focus on youth, mental health and relationships. Her work explores shared human experience with sensitivity and visual clarity. Alongside her narrative practice, she has collaborated with artists including Coldplay, Stormzy, Little Simz and Ed Sheeran, establishing a distinct voice in live music filmmaking.
Just A Boy is a tender, visually precise short built around the spoken-word of Sam Browne, confronting male loneliness and mental health with directness and care. Shot on 16mm, the film weaves together his poems with lived experience, tracing a journey away from the isolating pull of online hyper-masculinity towards empathy and connection.
Observational and restrained, the film lingers on small, intimate moments—friendship, conversation, shared time—offering a counterpoint to more performative ideas of masculinity. In doing so, it reframes vulnerability not as weakness, but as a necessary and collective act.
Fuse ODG, SUNDIATA — Christian Saint, New Saint Corp
Christian Saint is a Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist and director whose work is rooted in African storytelling and cultural authorship. Committed to reframing representation, his practice centres on narrative control—positioning African voices as custodians of their own histories.
His work spans collaborations with brands and artists including Beats by Dre, Apple, Roc Nation and musicians such as Tems and Davido, alongside features in GQ South Africa, Complex and The FADER. Recognised by the British Fashion Council as part of its Global New Wave Creatives, he continues to build a practice that moves between film, photography and exhibition.
In this work, Saint draws from West African oral tradition to tell a story of transformation—centred on a boy who rises to become a unifying force. Rejecting external perspectives, the film foregrounds African agency, with every element shaped by cultural specificity and care. Visually, it adopts a composed, tactile language—wide frames, natural light and sculptural compositions—balancing stillness with a sense of power.
Both tribute and act of reclamation, the film positions storytelling as a collective force—one rooted in history, shaped by the present, and carried forward on its own terms.
Vienna Tourist Board, VIENNA BITES — Bianca Poletti, Muellers Bureau
Bianca is an Argentine-American director whose work moves between music video, commercial and narrative. Drawing on dance and movement, she explores coming-of-age and the emotional complexity of youth through stylised, dreamlike worlds shaped by colour, light and production design.
Her films are character-driven and visually expressive, with a strong emphasis on casting and atmosphere. Her work has been featured across platforms including The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and NOWNESS, with Radical Honesty premiering at SXSW and Video Barn continuing its festival run while in development as a feature.
This project, created for Vienna Tourism, plays with the mythology of vampires—reframing the city through a darkly playful lens, where history, folklore and contemporary image-making collide.
Sisters — Annisa Shana Purnama, Trust, Runner Films
Shana is a Thai–Indonesian-born director and photographer based in New York. Her work moves between fiction, documentary and fashion, guided by an intuitive, emotionally driven approach that often blends subtle surrealism with a sense of warmth and vulnerability.
Rooted in personal experience, her films explore intimacy, memory and connection with a quiet, observational sensitivity. This short draws from her relationship with her sister—an early blueprint for understanding closeness and time—unfolding as something both deeply personal and gently universal.
Shigeto, DENSHO — Andrew Garcia, Easy Mondays
Andrew Garcia is a Cuban-American director and cinematographer from Miami, whose work explores coming-of-age and family narratives through a documentary-informed lens. Centred on questions of identity and heritage, his films often reflect the nuances of immigrant experience. His short La Piel De Ayer was acquired by HBO, while Tumba del Mar received Best Narrative Short at the RiverRun Film Festival.
Densho reflects his commitment to intimate, collaborative filmmaking—small-scale in process, but expansive in emotional scope. Through a shared artistic exchange, the film considers heritage not as a fixed identity, but as something lived, inherited and continuously redefined across generations.
Hide & Seek, Shadows — Alejandra Vidal, Trust
Alejandra Vidal is a director drawn to moments of quiet intimacy, crafting work that privileges feeling over observation. Through a delicate interplay of light, sound and narrative, her films seek to evoke a sensory, emotional response, blending ethereal imagery with a sensitivity to human experience.
Hide & Seek emerges from the fleeting rituals of childhood: small, everyday moments that slip by almost unnoticed. Shot on 16mm, the film leans into texture and imperfection, mirroring the way memory softens and distorts over time. Beneath its surface, it becomes a reflection on a deeper impulse: the enduring desire to be seen and found.
In Shadows, she turns to childhood as a space where imagination and reality begin to intersect. The film traces a fragile moment in which fantasy becomes a form of protection, softening the edges of loss while hinting at its inevitability.
Both intimate and introspective, these films reflect on the tension between wonder and grief, holding onto the idea that even in darkness, something luminous remains.
Loneliness Doesn’t Come Alone — Amanda Valle
Amanda Valle is a Dominican multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, film and sculpture. Her practice explores memory, belonging and the emotional residue of personal history, often shaped by her upbringing in Santo Domingo.
Her short film Back in the Island has screened internationally, earning recognition at the Berlin Commercial Festival and Milan Fashion Film Festival, while her wider work has been exhibited at Art Basel Miami and the Venice Biennale. Working between New York and Buenos Aires, she continues to expand a practice that moves fluidly between mediums.
Rooted in autobiography, her work reflects on absence, imagination and the fragility of experience—often through immersive visual worlds or delicate materials such as glass and porcelain. Her upcoming film, La Soledad No Viene Sola, extends this exploration, drawing from childhood memory with an intimate, introspective lens.
Ffern, PINK SKY AT NIGHT — Naghmeh Pour, new—land
Naghmeh is an Iranian-born, Copenhagen-based director whose work draws on a rich cultural duality, shaped by her upbringing between Iran and Denmark. With a background in literature and scriptwriting, her films are marked by a poetic sensibility, often using symbolism and metaphor to evoke emotion and reflection.
Her debut Iran-e Man, created as part of the Women Life Freedom Project, premiered on NOWNESS and received recognition at Cannes Lions, D&AD and the YDAs. Subsequent work, including Nowruz and campaigns for Ffern and Ethnicity Pay Gap Day, reflects a practice that moves fluidly between cultural narrative and commercial storytelling.
This film takes a more understated approach: a simple story of two siblings rediscovering their grandfather’s ice cream van, unfolding against the textures of a Cornish summer. Shot on film, it leans into softness and nostalgia, favouring atmosphere and sensory detail over direct representation—more akin to a light, impressionistic vignette than a traditional campaign.
Joy Crookes, CARMEN — Alice Fassi, LA\PAC & C41
Alice Fassi is an Italian director based between Milan and Paris, whose work has been recognised across festivals including Cannes Lions, Ciclope, 1.4 and the BFI.
Her films are defined by surreal atmospheres and quietly subversive narratives, often rooted in an observation of the absurd within the everyday. Moving fluidly between genres, she deconstructs familiar forms with a light, comic touch—bringing humour and unpredictability into otherwise precise, considered worlds.
Each year, selecting only a handful of projects is no easy task, with every film offering something distinct. We encourage you to take the time to explore the full selection for each category (Flying High, On The Cusp, In The Making), where the breadth of work speaks for itself.