We Are Parable has set the 2026 cohort for its talent development programme, Momentum. 

This year, the programme, which is backed by Channel 4 and Sony Pictures Television, received over 700 applications. 30 UK-based Black filmmakers made the final cut. Of the selected group, 55% are based outside London, with filmmakers hailing from Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Southampton, Telford, and Wolverhampton. Additionally, women make up 52% of the cohort. 

The cohort includes Emmy-nominated animation director Alex Zepherin-Pinnock and Ryan Walker-Edwards, the filmmaker behind the BFI Flare short MAN>CODE. 

Since launching in 2021, Momentum has supported 140 Black filmmakers. The programme is funded by Channel 4’s development programme 4Skills and run in association with Channel 4’s Creative Equity team and Sony Pictures Television, with financial support from the Sony Pictures Television Creative Diversity Fund.

Mentors for the 2026 edition include Greenacre Films’ Nadine Marsh-Edwards (Riches), BAFTA-nominated producer Danielle Goff (Lunar Pictures), HETV and independent film producer Stella Nwimo (Top Boy), BAFTA-nominated producer Victoria Thomas, producer/writer Tolu Stedford (Story Compound), BIFA-nominated writer-director Warda Mohamed, and filmmaker Rashida Seriki.

Founded by Anthony and Teanne Andrews, We Are Parable is one of the UK’s leading indie distributors. The company has brought titles such as Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama and Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel and Adama to UK cinemas. 

“What has always made Momentum important to us is that it responds to the full reality of building a career in this industry. Talent is not the issue,” Anthony Andrews, co-founder and creative director of We Are Parable, said in a statement. 

“The question is whether filmmakers have the access, support, confidence, and relationships needed to keep moving forward, particularly at a time when emerging filmmakers are navigating rising production costs, shrinking commissioning opportunities, and increasingly competitive access to development funding.” 

Andrews added: “We’ve seen previous cohorts use the programme to develop new work, raise finance, screen at festivals, and build lasting creative networks. This new cohort represents the next stage of that journey.”

Check out the 2026 Momentum cohort below: 

Adeyinka Akinrinade

Adeyinka is an actor and creative producer working across British TV, theatre and film. Her credits include the British Urban Film Festival, BFI-funded The Lost Land Girl, and screen roles in Riches (ITV/Amazon Prime), Champion (BBC/Netflix), Top Boy and Silent Witness. She has several short films under her belt and is about to launch her production company, with ambitions to move into features and TV series.

Leesha Williams

Leesha (she/her) is a queer Black photographer and filmmaker whose work explores identity, memory, motherhood and representation through honest, documentary-led storytelling. With over 10 years of experience, her practice blends digital footage, archival materials and Super 8 film. Currently a professional wedding filmmaker now shifting toward personal artistic projects focused on Black motherhood, queerness and reclaiming space through storytelling.

Alex Zepherin-Pinnock

Alex is the founder of Don Dada Studio and an animation director with over a decade of experience, collaborating with the BBC, Tate Britain, Disney and more. Don Dada Studio’s animations for The Guardian’s Give Me Shelter received an Emmy nomination. Alex is now running an animation service studio and now transitioning to creating original IP.

Alicia Quayson

Alicia is a London-based writer and director crafting bold stories rooted in the British diaspora experience. Her award-winning short Motherland established her voice; her debut narrative short Bless You is in post-production. Alicia is currently in post-production on her debut narrative short.

Aminah Alhamdu

Aminah is a writer, curator and filmmaker of Ghanaian origin and British-American nationality. She has created short films backed by Rural Media and BFI Network, and written four pilots and a feature script.

Andrew Boateng

Andrew is a writer, director and creator working in sci-fi, comedy and social realism. An Edinburgh TV Festival New Voice Award winner, he has worked with Archery Pictures, Firebird and Bullion Productions, with short films recognised at BAFTA/BIFA-qualifying festivals.

Bukola Bakinson

Bukola is a London-based documentary filmmaker whose RTS award-winning No Comprendo examined access to justice. Her current project From Detention to Despair explores authority, care and justice in contemporary education.

Cherish Anyanwu

Cherish is a multi-disciplinary creative, DJ, producer and emerging filmmaker whose work explores music, identity, healing and ancestral themes, centring female-led narratives.

Elisha Ricketts

Elisha is a South London–based writer, presenter and filmmaker. She wrote, directed, narrated and starred in her debut short Survival Mode, exploring trauma, resilience and reclaiming narrative.

Hayden McLean

Hayden is a British-Jamaican actor, writer and filmmaker. His debut short The Last Dance premiered in 2025 and screened at over 40 festivals worldwide, winning multiple awards and qualifying for BAFTA and BIFA. Hayden is about to world premiere his second short film, and in development with his debut feature, a second feature, and a limited series adaptation of his directorial debut.

Imoje Aikhoje

Imoje is a London-based documentary filmmaker and development producer, Netflix Documentary Talent Fund alumnus, and founder of Strayborn Ltd, with over ten years of experience across documentary film and factual television.

Janet Nagudi

Janet is a Ugandan British filmmaker, writer and artist whose work imagines bold, Afrofuturistic visions for the Black Diaspora and Pan-African community. Her first film was made in Birmingham featuring local cast, crew, musicians and businesses.

Jason C. Nwachukwu

Jason is a filmmaker based between Bristol and London whose work explores family, identity and human connection through an observational lens, searching for beauty in the ordinary.

Where they are now  Making short films recognised at UK festivals, and looking to keep developing while working toward his first feature.

John Kamara

John Kamara is a London-based filmmaker, writer and content creator. He independently produces, directs and distributes his own web series on YouTube, including DEBT, a three-part comedy about a bailiff drowning in his own debt.

Josiane Kameni

JOSY K. is a UK-based writer and emerging storyteller creating emotionally powerful narratives rooted in identity, resilience, womanhood, migration and healing. She is developing The SEL Collection, a body of literary and screen adaptation projects.

Justin Uzomba

Justin Smith Uzomba is a Hackney-born writer-director who spent a decade in music as Mikill Pane, touring with Ed Sheeran and Mac Miller. His short F.I.T.D. received high praise from Barry Jenkins. He is represented by Imagine Talent. Having written and directed two short films, co-written a C4 YouTube comedy series and directed Nike SNKRS content — building his screen career.

Kodjo Tsakpo

Kodjo is a television drama director with credits across most UK continuing dramas. His directing career launched in 2018 via the BBC New Directors Scheme at BBC Doctors.

Korrie Powell

Korrie is a London-based film director and writer whose work draws from the nuanced textures of everyday Black life. He has five years of experience across advertising and commercial filmmaking.

Martin Blackburn

Martin is a documentary, commercial and branded filmmaker currently independently co-producing his debut feature documentary about Raphael, a music curator who built a global audience through his mixes. Now  Directing his debut feature documentary alongside freelance projects.

Mevis Birungi

Mevis is a Ugandan-born British actor, writer, director and editor. Her credits include His House (Netflix), Nakato (BBC Arts, BFI Network), and editing work on BBC and Sky Kids animation.

Michael Akuagwu

Michael is a London-born multimedia artist who started with surrealist composite photography and has expanded into film and mixed media, exploring stories within Black British art and design.

Nana-Kofi Kufuor

Nana-Kofi is a British Ghanaian playwright and TV writer from Stockport. He won the Channel 4/New Writing North award for his series Dana, has worked in Sky writers’ rooms, and contributed to Hollyoaks and Waterloo Road.

Omari Swanston-Jeffers

Omari is an artist, educator and director whose practice spans dance, screen, stage and poetry. He holds a First Class BA in Creative Writing and a Master’s in Education, and founded Ol’ Man Swanny in 2023.

Ryan Walker-Edwards

Ryan is a Birmingham-born writer, actor and director with Jamaican heritage whose work explores class, sexuality and race in Afro-Caribbean communities. His short MAN>CODE screened at BFI Flare, Chicago IIFF and over thirty festivals, earning an RTS nomination. His work is gaining visibility and he has secured new commissions.

Shauna Paul

Shauna is a director and video editor from North London specialising in documentary and campaign work, with a raw and emotive visual style.

Simone Stewart

Simone is a Wolverhampton-born video journalist, producer and filmmaker. She has worked at BBC News and ITV Sport, and is currently supporting the UK’s first independent Windrush Commissioner. Simone has just finished filming short films for World Afro Day, and is transitioning from broadcast journalism into personal filmmaking.

Tayo Ibikunle

Ibitayo ‘Tsaint’ Ibikunle is a Nigerian-born filmmaker, cinematographer and creative producer, UK Endorsed Global Talent. His credits include BBC Africa Eye’s award-winning Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua, and his feature 60 Days is in production.

Tkay Boateng

Tkay Sophia Boateng is an emerging producer with four years of experience at

Whisper and IMG across the UEFA Champions League and Wimbledon. Her short Boys & Girls was nominated at Cannes; Castle in the Dark reached the semi-finals at Rhode Island IIFF.

Winnie Imara

Winnie is a producer-writer from North London and a recent NFTS graduate. Her work has been selected for BIFA-qualifying festivals, and she has produced projects for BBC, Somesuch, Black Girl Fest Studios and Spotify.

Appropriately for a surreal realm comprised of inexplicable angles that stretch across impossible dimensions and seem, as one explorer puts it, cobbled together by “construction workers on acid,” the Backrooms, as a premise, have no precise parameters. You might think of it less as a story than a shared alternate reality, originating as a creepypasta (internet-based urban legend) and then taking on a life of its own as fans added bits of lore and started to spin it into works of their own.

Now that concept seems poised to break containment into the mainstream with Backrooms, a slickly produced feature boasting a buzzy studio (A24), bona fide arthouse stars (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve) and established genre leaders (James Wan, Osgood Perkins) among the producers.

But if the film captures something of the concept’s intriguing unease — with 20-year-old director Kane Parsons drawing from his own Backrooms-set short films, created when he was just a teenager — its underbaked storytelling made me wonder if some spooky ideas might be better left as whispers in the dark.

Though the Backrooms are ineffably strange (“Imagine describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then asking them to draw it,” characters reply when asked to explain them), the world we cut through to get there is almost suspiciously normal. In a quiet California suburb circa 1990, Clark (Ejiofor) is a failed architect who makes his living as the proprietor of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — or rather tries to, since the discount furniture store’s total lack of customers suggests a business on the verge of collapse. His life has gotten miserable enough that he’s seeing a therapist, Mary (Reinsve), to deal with the implosion of his marriage.

Up late watching TV at the store one night (because he’s been sleeping there ever since his wife kicked him out after a bitter, booze-fueled fight), he ventures downstairs to fiddle with the breaker, whereupon he discovers he can just kind of slip through one of the walls, as easily as stepping into a beam of light. On the other side lies a room not unlike the windowless carpeted basement he’s emerged from. But this one is lit in a sickly institutional yellow, with all its furniture haphazardly piled in the middle. Also, it seems to go on forever. No matter how deep Clark wanders into it, all he finds are more rooms, corridors, staircases, doorways, crawlspaces.

It’s a deliciously creepy concept, tickling the same elemental unease provoked by other liminal horror stories like 2022’s unsettling Skinamarink or Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves: If structures like homes and offices and stores are meant to contain and protect, there’s something disturbing about one that refuses to conform to those boundaries — that shifts beyond the known laws of the universe so that what should have been a safe space becomes a trap.

The horrors that lie within this particular trap take some time to reveal themselves. At first, our disquiet and Clark’s mostly stem from sights that, while not overtly threatening, simply feel wrong: a stop sign printed backwards and erected in a dark room, a cardboard cutout fitted with a tape recording of messages in foreign languages, shoes embedded in the floor at an angle that suggests said floor materialized suddenly out of nowhere to slice right through them.

But eeriness for its own sake has its limits. The longer we spend exploring the Backrooms, the less frightening and more random these oddities start to feel. They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing; it works only until it becomes apparent that there are no meaningful answers forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Clark and Mary (to say nothing of other minor characters played by Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) are painted in extremely broad strokes. Even allowing that one of the movie’s central concerns is the way we create mental loops that keep us fixed in our miseries, the choice to define each of them through a single formative trauma and nothing else renders them too flat to care about.

I suppose the advantage of Clark’s lack of any other traits, including a self-preservation instinct, is that it makes him an ideal conduit for us into this universe: Since he never stops to consider whether wandering freely around what amounts to a haunted maze might be a bad idea, we never have to stop poking around it either. The further he goes, the more harrowing things get. The roar of a monster that had seemed distant at first seems to grow louder and more frequent, evidence of its violence clearer and harder to ignore (though never very graphic; Backrooms traffics more in dread than gore).

In its best moments, Backrooms brushes up against something bittersweet about the way our memories warp a little every time we access them, until they’ve been stripped of real details and we’re left only with the emotional imprint they’ve left behind. In one striking sequence, the camera glides down a succession of living room floors, each one growing more abstracted until all that remains is a pitch-black hole radiating menace from a corner. In another, grotesque humanoid figures are frozen in a dinner table scene, so lacking in feeling or agency that they do not protest even when they’re stabbed.

At its worst, Backrooms tries to raise the stakes by trading subliminal chills for more explicit but also more generic thrills, culminating in an action-y climax that seems to exist solely to fulfill audience expectations of how a mainstream horror movie is supposed to end. The film wants to invite you in, but the more the Backrooms try to explain themselves, the more quotidian they feel. This is a realm better left to the shadows, where unsuspecting souls can fall down its rabbit holes before they even know what’s hit them.

TV fanatics may have spent plenty time venting frustration as they waited for the latest season of their favorite show to drop, but this might not necessarily be a bad thing, according to Ampere Analysis.

New research from the firm has found that what it terms the “Stranger Things effect” was by no means imagined, with the average gap between seasons of scripted originals on major platforms almost doubling from 12 months in 2020 to 21 months in 2025.

Ampere singled out the Duffer Brothers’ hit franchise, one of Netflix‘s biggest shows of all time, which has become known for lengthy gaps between seasons alongside some of the most gargantuan marketing blitzes in the history of entertainment. It also spotlighted another Netflix show Wednesday as part of this trend, along with Apple TV tentpole Severance.

The average gap between seasons of scripted originals was just 10 months a decade ago, which slowly increased over the 10-year period, rising the most during the first year of the pandemic, when it shot up from 12 to 16, and from 2023 to 2024 during the U.S. labor strikes, when it went from 17 to 21. Last year it plateaued for the first time at 21.

Regardless of fan ire, Ampere feels the tactic works, flagging that shows with gaps of more than 30 months between seasons have achieved the highest engagement in the premiere month of the new season. Viewing of Stranger Things rose by 300% in H2 2025 ahead of the release of its fifth and final season, Ampere said, with particularly strong viewing of Season 1 suggesting new viewers were discovering the series and existing fans were revisiting earlier episodes.

Ampere did have a word of warning, pointing out that despite strong engagement around returning shows, long gaps create risk. In Q1 2026 in the U.S., 54% of respondents to an Ampere survey said they would be likely to cancel a service subscription if they were not using it often enough.

Senior analyst Christen Tamisin said “streamers need to balance blockbuster production timelines against a steady flow of content.” “Extended gaps may generate anticipation around flagship titles, but they can also encourage audiences to cancel subscriptions and return only when major shows are back on screen,” she added.