Graduate filmmaker wins BAFTA Student Award for documentary

Media Relations Team, 15 July 2024

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A man and woman stand smiling with an arm around each other looking at the camera. — Nyal and his partner Chloe at the Student BAFTA Awards in Los Angeles

Nyal Mueenuddin, a UWE Bristol graduate, has won a prestigious 2024 Yugo BAFTA Student Award – a global competition which celebrates the next generation of talented and innovative storytellers.

Nyal won the BAFTA Student Award for his documentary ‘When the Floods Come’, which tells the stories of people living with flood and drought along the Indus in Pakistan.

A Pakistani-American filmmaker and photographer, Nyal completed the MA Wildlife Filmmaking course in Bristol in February 2024. With an educational background in environmental science and South Asian studies, he has been working on telling stories of Pakistan's natural diversity and environmental challenges.

Universities and colleges worldwide were invited to submit their best projects for consideration; BAFTA members viewed 800 submissions from 109 schools across 37 countries, with Nyal's documentary chosen as the overall winner from a shortlist of three.

Nyal said: “I am unbelievably honoured to see this film nominated for a Student BAFTA and I’d like to thank the team who worked alongside me on this project.

“In the aftermath of the 2022 floods in Pakistan, I felt bewildered that in all the coverage of this climate disaster, displacing tens of millions and crippling countless families and communities across the country, I did not see a single personal testimony of the real people impacted by this calamity.

“I hoped that by tapping into the most intimate stories of the lives of Pakistanis, living in a rapidly changing world, and by sharing them as far and wide as we could, perhaps we could touch the remaining threads of humanity within the people who hold the power to make the changes needed to protect our people from an unhabitable future.”

The ceremony took place in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles on Friday 12 July – a stark contrast from his recent filming location in the highlands of Pakistan.

Jacqueline Butler, Dean and Head of School of Arts at UWE Bristol, added: “Nyal’s film is truly extraordinary and tells an incredibly powerful story. To win this award amongst this talented group of global filmmakers is something he should be very proud of. It also demonstrates how our graduates from the School of Arts at UWE Bristol are shaping the future of filmmaking, nurturing talent and readying of our creative graduates to be successful in this industry. Congratulations Nyal.”

UWE Bristol’s MA in Wildlife Filmmaking, which was co-designed and is accredited by BBC Studios NHU, is immensely successful with 94% of its graduates finding employment each year.

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