At the 79th BAFTA Film Awards, queer cinema’s victories were measured not in trophies alone. From a stop-motion love story five years in the making to a BDSM debut that sat alongside Spielberg, the evening’s quieter currents told a story the headlines missed.
Two Black Boys in Paradise, a short animated film based on a poem by Dean Atta, follows the love story of Eden and Dula.You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
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The stop-motion figures moved the way water does in a dream — slowly, with a weight that belonged to feeling rather than physics. Two young Black men, animated in miniature, swam towards one another through a hand-built sea: hair flowing, limbs outstretched, reaching for a kind of paradise that existed nowhere except in the careful labour of the people who had made it. Two Black Boys in Paradise, directed by Baz Sells and produced by Ben Jackson, adapted from a poem by Dean Atta, had taken five years and more than a hundred collaborators to complete in a cold warehouse in Manchester’s Red Bank. On the night of 22 February 2026, at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank, it was announced as the winner of the BAFTA for Best British Short Animation. When Atta collected the award, he said what the film had already said without words: “As a Black gay man, I rarely get to see myself onscreen in something that isn’t a tragedy.”
The line landed in a room that contained Leonardo DiCaprio, the Prince and Princess of Wales and roughly two thousand people in formal wear, and it did not ask permission to land. It simply arrived, the way truth does when it has been earned by five years of painstaking craft rather than offered as a slogan. The 79th BAFTA Film Awards, hosted by the openly queer Scottish actor Alan Cumming, were dominated in the headlines by Paul Thomas Anderson’s six-win sweep for One Battle After Another and by the extraordinary upset of Robert Aramayo’s best-actor triumph over DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet for his performance as Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson in I Swear. But for those paying attention to the quieter frequencies of the evening, the ceremony told a second, less publicised story — one about the shifting ground beneath queer cinema in Britain and the distance still left to travel. (For ongoing coverage of LGBTQ+ representation in European film, see GAY45.)
The most visible queer presence in the main competition was Pillion, Harry Lighton’s debut feature — a gay BDSM romance adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill, starring Harry Melling as a timid parking-ticket inspector who enters a dom/sub relationship with Alexander Skarsgård’s enigmatic biker. The film arrived at the BAFTAs with three nominations: Outstanding British Film, Adapted Screenplay and Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. It went home without a trophy. But its very presence in those categories marked something worth pausing over.
Lighton, who is openly gay and studied at Oxford before assisting on Oliver Hermanus’s Living, had described his ambition in interviews as wanting to “upturn people’s expectations of what a BDSM film could be.” The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, where it won the screenplay prize. By the time it reached British cinemas in November 2025, critics had taken to calling it a “dom-com” — a phrase Lighton himself preferred. What made Pillion remarkable was less its explicitness, though it did not flinch, than its refusal to treat queer kink as either spectacle or cautionary tale. The parents in the film are entirely accepting. The conflict is internal, psychological, rooted in the mundane negotiations of desire and self-knowledge. At the BIFAs, it had already won Best British Independent Film. At the BAFTAs, it was nominated alongside films backed by Spielberg, Scorsese and Anderson. That a debut feature about bootlicking and leather could sit in those categories without apology was, in its own way, the point.
Real members of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club had appeared in the film and attended its premiere at Cannes. Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears made his screen acting debut as a biker named Kevin. At Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend in Washington, D.C., Lighton had mingled with the kink community while promoting the A24 release. The film’s journey from Manchester’s leather bars to the BAFTA nomination slate was itself a kind of argument: that stories rooted in specific queer subcultures are not niche curiosities but cinema, full stop.
The broader queer map of the ceremony was uneven, as such maps tend to be. Elio, the Pixar film originally conceived by openly gay filmmaker Adrian Molina — who departed the project after its queer-coded elements were reportedly sanded away by studio executives — had been nominated for Best Animated Film but lost to Zootropolis 2. Wicked: For Good, featuring LGBTQ+ icon Cynthia Erivo, was recognised with nominations in Costume Design and Make-up and Hair, though both awards went to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. And then there was the curious case of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novella, with Daniel Craig in the lead: a film whose title alone seemed to promise a prominent place in any conversation about representation. Despite reaching the BAFTA longlists, it was largely shut out of the final nominations. Craig’s performance, admired by many critics, did not survive the cut to the six-strong best-actor shortlist.
The absence was instructive. A title is not politics, and a film about queerness is not automatically an advance for queer cinema. What the BAFTAs rewarded instead — and what the evening’s quieter stories suggested — was something more structural: the presence of queer artists behind the camera, the integration of queer narratives into categories not marked off as special interest and the recognition, however incomplete, that the stories emerging from LGBTQ+ communities belong in the main programme rather than the margins. The BFI NETWORK and BAFTA Mentoring programme, which had spotlighted several emerging LGBTQ+ creatives as part of its BFI Flare mentee cohort, was one institutional expression of this. Atta’s acceptance speech was another, less institutional but more lasting.
Cumming himself was a study in the contradictions the evening held. The openly queer Scottish actor, replacing two consecutive years of David Tennant as host, opened with a monologue that invited the room — which included Prince William, sitting in the front row as BAFTA’s president — to let out a collective primal scream. “Watching the films this year was like taking part in a collective nervous breakdown,” he said, before offering sly political asides about Zootropolis 2’s plot of corrupt leaders and persecution. He distributed British snack food to bemused Hollywood stars. He caught Paul Mescal on his phone. He closed the night with what the source material describes as a “heartfelt little speech about diversity that showed that you don’t always have to be hilarious to get a message across.”
But the ceremony’s most disquieting moment had nothing to do with Cumming’s scripted material. John Davidson, the Tourette’s campaigner whose life inspired I Swear, was seated in the auditorium as an invited guest. His involuntary vocal tics — including profanity and, in one distressing incident, a racial slur shouted while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting the visual-effects award — punctuated the first half of the evening. Cumming paused proceedings twice to thank the audience for their understanding. Davidson subsequently left the hall of his own accord. The incident sat at the intersection of two forms of visibility that the ceremony was simultaneously trying to celebrate: the representation of neurological difference and the duty not to cause harm. Tolerance, as the source material notes, appeared to prevail, though the discomfort was real and unresolved.
The other unspoken presence was dynastic. Three days before the ceremony, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office. His nephew William, BAFTA’s president, arrived at the Royal Festival Hall with the Princess of Wales, both in conspicuously glamorous form. Cumming, despite his reputation for mischief, said nothing about it. Nobody on stage did. The omission had the quality of a particularly British genre of silence — the kind that communicates precisely by refusing to speak, a negative space shaped like scandal. It was, in its way, the evening’s most accomplished piece of theatre.
The night’s dominant narrative, rightly, belonged elsewhere: to Anderson’s sweep, to Ryan Coogler’s historic three wins for Sinners (including becoming the first Black winner of the BAFTA for Original Screenplay), to Jessie Buckley’s affecting win for Hamnet and to Aramayo’s jaw-dropping upset. But beneath those headlines, a smaller architecture was being assembled — one short animation at a time, one debut nomination at a time, one queer filmmaker invited to sit in the same room as Spielberg and not feel like a guest.
In the warehouse in Red Bank where Two Black Boys in Paradise was made, the production team had averaged twelve frames of animation per day during the underwater sequences. Stop-motion is perhaps the most labour-intensive form of filmmaking: each second of screen time is built, frame by frame, with the patience of someone constructing a cathedral out of matchsticks. The flowing locs of the two figures required constant puppet repairs. The hundred-and-eighty-degree camera move around the boat had to be performed by hand, simultaneously, as the figures were repositioned. Five years of this. For a seven-minute film about two young men swimming towards each other in a paradise free from shame.
The ceremony itself was chaotic. John Davidson, the Scottish Tourette’s campaigner whose life inspired I Swear, attended as a guest at the Royal Festival Hall. The audience had been warned that he might vocalise involuntarily. During the opening minutes, he shouted “Boring!” and other expletives; later, as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented Best Visual Effects, a tic resulted in the N-word being heard in the hall. There was an audible gasp. Davidson left shortly afterwards of his own accord; BAFTA said he would not have asked him to leave.
Alan Cumming paused proceedings to acknowledge the “strong language” and reminded viewers that Tourette’s tics are involuntary. When the ceremony was broadcast on BBC One with a two-hour delay, the slur was not removed from the initial transmission, though it was later taken down from iPlayer after complaints.
In the same edit, the acceptance speech by Akinola Davies Jr — which referenced the Israel–Gaza war and concluded with “Free Palestine” — was cut. So too was a joke by Cumming that appeared to refer to Donald Trump. The BBC said the three-hour ceremony had to be reduced to two hours and that other material was also removed for time. The discrepancy prompted criticism about editorial judgment.
What Atta said on stage was not a plea. It was a statement of fact delivered with the calm of someone who has spent a career turning fact into poetry: that queer Black joy remains rare on screen, that its rarity is not natural but constructed, and that the construction of an alternative — a paradise, if you like, made by hand in a cold room in Manchester — is work that deserves to be recognised not as niche but as necessary. The BAFTA, small and gold, was evidence that at least one institution had begun to agree. Whether the agreement holds, whether the architecture being quietly assembled survives the next funding cycle and the next political season, is the question that queer journalism exists to keep asking.
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