Jury Insights – Interview with Sham Nayan

Today, we continue our “Jury Insights” blog series with Sham Nayan, who joins this year’s Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards jury.

A storyteller driven by visual innovation, Sham is a Creative Director at Onedash22 and an award-winning director and writer. His work spans documentary, branded content, and creative projects, combining cinematic craft with emerging technologies to create impactful narratives.

His portfolio includes the documentary “Let’s Begin,” and he is already familiar with the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards stage, having previously earned a Dolphin Trophy.

In this conversation, Sham explores how creativity is evolving, from the growing uniformity of highly polished productions to the uneven adoption of AI in this year’s entries, and why authenticity is increasingly proving more valuable than budget.

He also shares his perspective on what truly separates a strong entry from an award-winning one and reveals which industry he believes has the greatest opportunity to redefine how it tells its story.

“Craft is a form of respect. For the audience, for the story, for the people trusting you with it.” – Sham Nayan

Q: Can you tell us a little about your professional journey? What has been the most defining moment of your career so far?

I've spent a little over a decade in film and video, most of it in Singapore, where I now serve as a Creative Director at onedash22, a creative production company. We work a lot with institutions, government agencies, and public organisations; helping them tell stories they've traditionally been quite guarded about.

People expect the defining moment to be a big project or an award. Mine was a person. Early in my career, I worked under a mentor, Malek (Albert) Hue, who was, frankly, difficult to please. He'd look at my work that I was proud of and ask why every single frame was there, what value did my actions bring or if there were just mechanical. If I didn't have an answer, he will just move on. At the time it felt brutal. It took me years to understand what he was teaching me: that craft is a form of respect. For the audience, for the story, for the people trusting you with it.

Everything I've built since runs on that. The clients changed, the tools changed, the company grew. The standard he set in me never moved, just adapted to the world.

Q: Has participating in the jury changed the way you view your own work or the industry?

More than I expected, honestly. When you're making work, you see it one project at a time. On a jury you see hundreds of films side by side, and patterns appear that you'd never notice from inside your own edit suite.

The uncomfortable part is that every film I score quietly scores my own taste back. I've caught myself admiring things I would have talked a client out of, and questioning habits I thought were principles. That's been humbling in a useful way.

It's also sharpened my sense of what my actual job is. The tools of our industry are changing every few months. What doesn't change is the need for someone to decide what's true, what's earned, what deserves to exist. Judging has made me more certain that this is the real work of a creative director now.

Q: What are your impressions of this year's entries? Are there any trends or approaches that have caught your attention?

The overall craft level is genuinely high. Cinematography, sound, editing the technical floor of this industry has risen enormously. But that's created a new problem: sameness. A lot of beautifully made films look and move like each other. Same drone language, same score swells, same structure. When everything is polished, polish stops being a differentiator.

AI is starting to appear in the entries, and unevenly. Some teams use it thoughtfully, invisibly, in service of the story. Others use it because they can, and you feel it immediately. It's an honest snapshot of where the whole industry is right now—mid-transition, still finding the line.

What's struck me most, though, is that the films staying with me are rarely the biggest productions. They're the honest ones. A film that lets a real person speak plainly, or admits something imperfect about the organisation behind it, cuts through a hundred glossy ones. Emotional honesty is beating budget this year, and I find that quietly encouraging.

Q: In your view, what distinguishes a good entry from an award-winning one?

A good entry answers the brief. An award-winning one makes you forget there was a brief.

Good films are competent everywhere; well shot, well structured, clear message. You respect them. But they tend to be interchangeable; another capable team could have made the same film. The award-winners carry decisions that only that team, with that subject, at that moment, could have made. A strange structural choice that turns out to be exactly right. A silence where every instinct says to add music. A truth left in that most organisations would have cut.

So for me the distinction is earned risk. Not recklessness, the craft has to be there first. But at some point the film has to stop being safe. That's usually the frame where I sit up.

Q: What does a corporate film need to have for it to stay in your mind long after the judging is over?

One true moment. That's really it.

I can't recall every film I've judged, but I can tell you the exact moments that stayed: a particular face, a sentence someone said imperfectly, or a shot held three seconds longer than comfortable. Memory doesn't store films whole. It stores moments, and it only stores the ones that feel true.

Which means restraint matters more than people think. A film crammed with messages leaves nothing behind. A film built patiently around one honest moment can stay with a juror—or a customer, or a citizen—for years. If I could give the industry one note, it would be that: stop trying to say everything. Say one thing like you mean it.

Q: If you could see one industry completely reinvent the way it tells its stories, which would it be — and why?

Government and public institutions. Without hesitation.

They hold the most consequential stories any organisation can hold; safety, justice, health, the social fabric itself and for understandable reasons they've historically told those stories in the most cautious way possible. The stakes make them careful. But caution, on film, often reads as distance. And distance is exactly what a public institution can't afford in an era of low trust.

I've been fortunate to work with public agencies in Singapore that are starting to move differently — showing the humans inside the uniform, acknowledging difficulty instead of projecting invincibility. When an institution tells the truth about itself on film, something shifts in how people relate to it. Trust isn't built by claiming perfection. It's built by being knowable. No sector has more to gain from learning that than the public one, because when it works, the beneficiary isn't a brand. It's a society.

Q: As a jury member, what do you believe is the true value of awards, and why are platforms like the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards important for the industry?

The trophies are the visible part, but I don't think they're the point. The point is that somewhere, a group of practitioners sits down and asks, seriously and in public: what does good look like this year? That question, asked consistently for years, is how a craft holds its standards, especially now, when the volume of content is exploding and the tools to make it are available to everyone.

Awards also do something for the people behind the work. Corporate filmmakers rarely get festivals, premieres, or reviews. Their best work often lives inside a company and disappears. A platform like Cannes says: this is a craft, it has a canon, and excellence here counts. That recognition changes what young filmmakers believe is worth aspiring to.

And that's the part I value most — the standard outlives everyone who set it. The bar we hold as jurors this year becomes the floor someone else builds from next year. Most of what we make is temporary. Contributing to a standard is one of the few things in this industry that isn't.