The latest winner of the Turner Prize - now in its 30th year - will be announced tonight at Tate Britain.

Four artists - Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Leigh's Tris Vonna-Michell - have been shortlisted for the annual contemporary art prize.

Cardiff-born Richards, 31, is showing Rosebud 2013, his film which includes partially censored, erotic images from a book found in a Tokyo library.

As well as scenes of puddles, a bird, and the contours of a fingertip, his black-and-white footage also features "a head of elderflowers trailed lightly over lips, skin and genitals".

His footage is described as "poetic meditations on the pleasure, sensuality and the voyeurism that is in the act of looking".

His film, which has prompted the gallery to warn visitors about the adult nature of some content, uses a "range of emotional tone" to elicit a response from the viewer, according to curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas.

His second work, The Screens 2013, features slides from a manual on how to create make-up effects, such as wounds, bruises and blood, for the theatre.

Three of the four artists shortlisted are showing film.

Vonna-Michell's film Finding Chopin: Dans l'Essex (2014), features salt marshes and the Essex coastline and is inspired by a French sound poet who spent part of his life in Essex, close to where the 31-year-old artist grew up.

His other work, Postscript II (Berlin) 2014, is a slide installation based on a story about the artist's mother's childhood in post-war Germany.

Dublin-born Campbell's films - one of which lasts almost an hour - tackle African art and colonialism and equations from Karl Marx's Capital Volume 1.

Ms Carey-Thomas said that all the shortlisted artists tackled a "lack of fixed meaning" in the world around them in their work.

The predominant use of film in the show responded to "how we navigate the world increasingly through images", she added.

"The internet changed the way that we interact with each other. It's only natural that the artists respond to that."

Glasgow-based artist Phillips, 38, is the only artist not to use film in the exhibition. Her installation, Things Shared (2014), features prints.

The Turner Prize has a reputation for controversy. Previous winners have included Martin Creed's installation featuring a light going on and off and Grayson Perry's pots tackling subjects like death and child abuse.

  • The ceremony will be broadcast live on Channel 4 from 7.30pm. 

:: The Turner Prize 2014 exhibition runs to January 4 at Tate Britain in central London.