JURY MEMBERS - 2026

Daragh Carville is a playwright and screenwriter, best known for co-creating and writing the ITV crime drama The Bay. First broadcast on ITV in 2019, The Bay has been sold to over 130 countries worldwide.

Daragh’s other TV credits include Being Human (BBC3, 2013), 6 Degrees (BBC NI, 2013/15) and The Smoke (Kudos/Sky One, 2014). His films are Middletown (dir. Brian Kirk, 2006) and Cherrybomb (dir. Lisa Barros d’Sa / Glen Leyburn, 2008.) Work for radio includes Regenerations (BBC Radio 3, 2001), which was nominated for the Richard Imison Award, and Dracula (Radio 4, 2003) starring Michael Fassbender.

Daragh Carville has won both the Stewart Parker and the Meyer Whitworth awards for playwriting and has twice been nominated as Best Writer in the Irish Film and TV Awards. He teaches Scriptwriting at Birkbeck, University of London.

Roger Ashton-Griffiths is a distinguished British character actor, screenwriter, and film director, best known for his role as Mace Tyrell in HBO's Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Born in Hertfordshire, he read music at Lancaster University, graduating in 1978, and began his career as a singer with English National Opera at the London Coliseum.

He has appeared in numerous high-profile films, including Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) and The Brothers Grimm (2005), Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002), Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986), Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), A Knight's Tale (2001), The Lobster (2015), and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010). His television work includes The Tudors (2007-2010), Doctor Who (2005-), Father Brown (2013-), and Coronation Street (1960-).

Roger holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of East London (2003) and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (2016).

Dr Maryam Ghorbankarimi is a filmmaker and film scholar, focusing on representation of women both in front of and behind the camera. Her current research is on transnational cinemas and cultures, specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Her first book entitled A Colourful Presence; The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema was published in 2015. Her second book is on seminal Iranian female filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad was published in spring 2021. She started her production company Bina Film in 2020 and has been collaborating with other local filmmakers in the Northwest England.