2025 Nominees

Tell Them You Love Me

Mindhouse Productions, Sky Documentaries, Sky Studios, Kino Lorber

UK, USA

- Social Issues & Current Affairs

When Tell Them You Love Me launched in early in 2024, it immediately provoked intense debate; it’s a film that’s impossible not to think and talk about in the days following. Directed by Nick August-Perna, this feature-length documentary tells the extraordinary tale of Anna Stubblefield, a white professor at Rutgers University, and her relationship with Derrick Johnson, a non-verbal Black man with cerebral palsy. The sequence of events that followed after they met saw Anna arrested and charged with sexual assault, and a criminal trial that divided America – was Anna a conniving predator, a benevolent lover or something more complex? Beautifully made, utilising archive, re-creation, court documents and the text written by Derrick/Anna saved on a digital writing device, this is a meticulously researched deep-dive into a scandal that poses complex questions about the nature of consent, disability, race and love.