Awards
A Place of One’s Own Wins at Big Syn 2026 and Lights Up Piccadilly Circus
This week, a film about toilets played on the most famous screen in Britain.
A Place of One’s Own, the documentary we made for SATO, part of LIXIL, won Best CSR/Ad Film (UK) at the 2026 Big Syn International Film Festival in London. Big Syn calls itself the world’s biggest sustainability film festival, and its winners get a slot on the Piccadilly Lights. Seeing the film above Piccadilly Circus, with the buses going past underneath, is something none of us will forget.
A film about something most of us never think about
3.4 billion people live without safe sanitation. SATO is LIXIL’s sanitation social business. It makes affordable toilets and handwashing products and sells them through local markets, working with the masons, retailers and entrepreneurs who live in the communities it serves.
When SATO’s team first got in touch in August 2025, they asked whether a commissioned film about sanitation could stand on its own as a documentary. We thought it could, as long as it treated the people in it as customers, makers and entrepreneurs, not as people to feel sorry for.
Filmed across six countries
Between February and April 2026 the team filmed in Kenya, Rwanda, India, Bangladesh, Japan and the USA. The film is guided by two people with a first-hand stake in the story: sanitation activist Shomy Chowdhury, and Alex Njagi, who leads SATO in Kenya. Around them are families, masons, retailers, health promoters and teachers, plus the designer of the SATO pan and LIXIL’s leadership in Tokyo.
Ollie Couch and Morgan Cartlidge directed it together, with Ollie behind the camera. They shot on vintage lenses for warmth and added 8mm film on location. Leon Nikoo drew an animated map sequence by hand, and Rowan Perkins wrote an original score.
“I built the film to resist its genre. I never wanted it to edge towards poverty porn; I wanted to show people with dignity and agency.”
Ollie Couch, co-director
From Nairobi to Piccadilly Circus
The film premiered to SATO’s teams in Nairobi in September and in Goa in October. In October it was named an Official Selection at Big Syn. At the festival’s awards gala in London on 6 November, it won Best CSR/Ad Film (UK), and a short cut then played on the Piccadilly Lights.
A Place of One’s Own launches publicly around World Toilet Day on 19 November. You can watch the trailer at aplaceofonesown.com, see the full list of 2026 Big Syn winners, or browse all our awards.
Thank you
A huge thank you to Jan Shepherd, Janaína Campoy, Erin McCusker and the whole SATO team for trusting us with this story. Thank you to every contributor who let us into their homes and workplaces, to our fixers and crews in every country, and to Big Syn for the recognition.
The screen was pretty special. But what we’re proudest of is the people in the film, and how they got to tell their own stories.
Credits
- Commissioned by SATO, part of LIXIL
- Directed by Oliver Couch and Morgan Cartlidge
- Director of Photography: Oliver Couch
- Producer: Morgan Cartlidge
- Second Camera: Harrison Wood
- Editor: Stephen Watson
- Colourist: Alexander Webb
- Composer: Rowan Perkins
- Sound Mix: Alex Hamaday
- Animation: Leon Nikoo
- Artwork: Enrico Artuso
