'Give It Up!' wins our Innovation in Filmmaking award

Congratulations to Alexander Bigaliy (aged 18) and Arseniy (aged 14) from Guildford, England, whose film 'Give It Up!' has won our Innovation in Filmmaking award (sponsored by Lucasfilm Ltd.) at the Into Film Awards 2026.

Vividly blending live action footage with LEGO stop motion, and black and white with colour, 'Give It Up!' is a cinematic tour-de-force that eschews traditional narrative to tap into existentialism, surrealism, and classic German expressionism, with a Kafkaesque nightmare of a man trying to escape a liminal city that exists outside of time and space.

Inspired by Franz Kafka's short story of the same name, this deeply personal and referential work preserves Kafka's absurd humour and pays homage to the Weimar cinema of the 1920s. It was the filmmakers' intent to elevate the text to an existential meditation on authority, purpose and human helplessness. Impressively, Alexander also secured the talents of Emmy-nominated composer Nicholas Singer to provide original music for the film.

"With 'Give It Up!', I wanted to create something I had never seen before on the screen", explained the film's director Alexander. "The result is a film that shatters the boundary between mediums, fusing live-action footage with stop-motion animation to create a disorientating, dreamlike hybrid form. The film isn't meant to be understood in a conventional way, but experienced. It draws on dream logic. Rather than guiding the viewer, it invites them into a shared psychological space. I think cinema is at its most powerful when it trusts the viewer."

"Over the course of a year, I immersed myself completely in the project. Many ideas came to me in dreams; at times I felt almost possessed by the story and its characters. The process began to mirror the narrative - I felt like the protagonist, struggling to navigate a foreign city with no way out."

"In many ways, the film feels increasingly relevant today: systems of authority falter, individuals feel lost, and the search for meaning remains unresolved. My aim was to translate these timeless ideas into a contemporary cinematic experience."

There's no doubt 'Give It Up!' is a worthy first winner of our new Innovation in Filmmaking award, with many of the judges remarking that the film was unlike anything they'd ever seen. "For 'Give It Up!', innovation was essential because I knew our surreal world could not be captured through conventional filmmaking. It demanded a new cinematic language - one that could immerse audiences in confusion, absurdity, and instability, rather than simply depict it. I am especially proud that the film explores these ideas on a very limited budget, showing that constraint can be a catalyst for originality."

Expanding on the limited budget, Alexander explained how this actually help to push the film to new creative heights. "Working with an almost non-existent budget was a creative catalyst, as I had to construct surreal environments through inventive lighting, practical effects and an immersive soundscape. The sound design, consisting of layered drones, reversed SFX and original compositions that play with the elements of time and dreams, became a crucial part of the story, hinting at the protagonist's character as well as the cyclical structure."

"Across every stage, the aim was to achieve the feeling of large-scale, cinematic filmmaking through minimal means - using practical effects, inventive lighting, and careful framing to transform limitation into our greatest strength."