Xposure honours outstanding filmmakers across 4 categories

The Xposure International Film Awards 2026 honoured global filmmakers whose work demonstrates purposeful storytelling and cinematic craft during a dedicated awards ceremony held on Monday.

The latest edition attracted 634 film submissions from more than 60 countries, highlighting the festival’s growing international reach and its expanding focus on film as a vital visual medium.

Presented during the 10th edition of the Xposure International Photography Festival, the awards celebrated excellence across Cinematic Arts, Visual Effects, Documentary Feature, and Short Film, reinforcing film’s position as a core pillar of Xposure’s visual storytelling programme.

Through the film awards, Xposure acknowledges film as an essential medium within its wider visual culture platform, supporting cinematic works that document reality and engage with social and cultural narratives.

The awards were presented by Tariq Saeed Allay, Director General of the Sharjah Government Media Bureau (SGMB), and Alya Al Suwaidi, Director of SGMB.

In the Best Cinematic Arts Award category, Danish Farhan (UAE) won for Bedouins of the Wind, with Kazakhstan’s Maxim Akbarov named runner-up for Steppe.

The Best Visual Effects award went to Iran’s Majid Farzolahi for Story of the Earth: Anarchy, while fellow Iranian filmmaker Mahdi Hadizadeh received the runner-up prize for Holy Death.

Caspar Diederik from Netherlands won Best Documentary Feature for Muga, When She Stops Flowing, So Will We, with Portugal’s Fernando Teixeira named runner-up for Wilder Côa. The Best Short Film award was claimed by Latvia’s Sergios DeLaurentis for Crimson Silence, while Palestinian filmmaker Ahmed Deeb placed second for Farfour: A War Diary from Gaza.

The Xposure Achievement Award in Film and Documentary was presented to Abraham Joffe for Trade Secret, which also made its UAE premiere at the festival. The award honoured his sustained body of work exploring the complex relationship between people, wildlife, and the systems shaping the natural world.

Oceans at breaking point: The accelerating collapse of marine ecosystems was placed under the spotlight at the Conservation Summit of the Xposure International Photography Festival (2026), where three internationally acclaimed underwater photographers presented visual and scientific evidence documenting the decline of coral reefs, kelp forests, and ocean biodiversity.

Held as part of the festival’s 5th Conservation Summit, the programme brought together Dr Alp Can, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich and National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry. Through long-term photographic projects and field research, the speakers examined how climate change, industrial activity, and local environmental pressures are reshaping oceans at an unprecedented pace.

Dr Alp Can, an underwater photographer with more than 2,500 dives, opened the session with A Photographic Odyssey: Rise & Fall of Coral Reefs. His work traced the transformation of coral reefs from thriving ecosystems into degraded landscapes.

Presenting recent findings from Florida, Dr Can noted that one in five corals has already disappeared. While global warming remains the primary driver, he stressed that local human pressures continue to weaken reef resilience. Although individuals cannot reverse climate change alone, he argued that coordinated action can still reduce cumulative damage.

Ehrlich shifted the focus to kelp forests with her presentation Forests of the Sea, documenting ecosystems that once lined nearly 30 per cent of the world’s coastlines.

She revealed that more than 60 percent of kelp forests have deteriorated or vanished within her lifetime. Drawing on her work in South Africa’s Great African Seaforest, Ehrlich described how the global response to My Octopus Teacher transformed public awareness. Following the film’s release in September 2020, she said, the overwhelming global reaction enabled her team to launch the 1001 Seaforest Species Project, which has since documented over 900 species and uncovered new ecological relationships, including multi-generational octopus dens.