York student filmmakers recognised at prestigious Royal Television Society Student awards
Posted on Thursday 13 March 2025
HUNT scooped the Best Factual (long form) Award at this year’s RTS Student Awards (Yorkshire Region).
In addition, the film won Best Student Film at the prestigious International Motor Film Awards 2025, the world’s largest celebration of automotive media, becoming the first University of York film to ever win an international award.
The film explores the life of Freddie Hunt, son of 1976 Formula 1 World Champion James Hunt, who leaves his life and legacy in the fast lane to find peace in farming and nature conservation on a rural Scottish Farm.
Previous success
The film, part of the BSc Film & Television Production third year Film & Television Group Projects module, was Directed by Thalia Saleh with David Merritt as Producer. Ed Shaw was editor, while Charlie Ord was the Cinematographer and Alex Weir responsible for Sound.
Students have from November to May to complete the work, including preproduction, production and postproduction.
The latest award follows previous successes for the film, which has already been awarded Best Student film at the Graddies awards in the Autumn.
Craft awards
The student filmmakers, from the School of Arts and Creative Technologies (ACT), also picked-up individual craft awards for their work in cinematography, sound and editing, and judges also created new craft awards for directing and producing based on the overall strength of the work witnessed in those areas.
The film faced stiff competition from a number of other universities and colleges across the Yorkshire and Humber region and stood out in a strong field of filmmakers, with judges commenting on how the project would ‘not look out of place on Sky Sports’.
Thalia Saleh, director of HUNT, said: “I couldn’t be prouder of our team and I’m so happy to see people enjoy HUNT as much as we enjoyed making it. Congratulations to all the other winners. It was an honour being in a room with so many talented storytellers."
Incredibly proud
Matt Brannan, Head of Film & Television at the School of ACT, said: “This was an amazing achievement by the HUNT team and the School is incredibly proud of them all.
“The team’s work, closely supported by their project supervisor, Lorianne Hall (senior lecturer in Film & TV Production) and all staff involved in their teaching further demonstrates and evidences the high quality of students and project work our Film & TV course continues to develop at York.
“It is great to see HUNT do so remarkably well at the RTS awards, and we are optimistic that further national success will follow. Our students are very talented and we could not be happier for them.”
The winners will now go forward to represent Yorkshire RTS in the Royal Television Society National Student TV Awards in London in June 2025.
