WINNERS

MONTH OF JULY

Your Loss My Gloss

Just before the biggest performance of her career, expressionist dancer Skylar receives a fateful call. Will she manage to turn her inner wounds into a triumph?

Best Screenplay (Under 40min) - Iris May & Matthias Luthard

The Amazing Lulu

The Swiss filmmaker Lucienne Lanaz recounts 80 years of life striving every time to give birth to a new film outside traditional production circuits. Through the rhythm of her memories, we discover a woman engaged in life. In order to fulfill her life’s dream, she worked in many other professions and paid the full price for her irrepressible desire for freedom.
Lulu speaks with clarity and with an infinite love of life.

Best Documentary( Over 40 min ) - Directed by Mathias Wälti

The Trouble With Nature

The year 1769. The conservative thinker Edmund Burke has fled London, debt collectors and a ramping midlife crisis to go on a grandtour of the Alps to rewrite his own book on the Sublime in this 18. century roadmovie. Stakes are high - Burke has lost everything in risky colonial investments and all depends on the new edition of the masterpiece of his youth and his face-to- face meeting with nature. Having lost his staff he is traveling only with Awak – a servant with native blood on loan from his brother’s plantation in the west indies. The trip is a disaster - Burke has never set foot in nature before and finds himself lost in Provence struggling to even find the Alps. Furthermore he soon discovers that he hates nature - it stings, itches and fails to enlighten him. Meanwhile Awak is deeply involved with everything around her and Burke grows bitter and jealous of her connection to the wild elements. Burke’s increasingly desperate and pathetic attempt to unlock the mysteries of the sublime, turns defiant and suicidal as he decides to scale a towering snow covered peak to prove himself the Master of nature and revenge the discomforts it has bestowed upon him.
‘The Trouble with Nature’ is an absurd allegory of our human relation to the natural world, and a lesson in the consequences of our desire to profit from it. Portraying the untrue travels of Edmund Burke (1729 -1797), who is regarded as one of the principal architects of modern capitalist thinking, one man’s failure to comprehend nature mirrors our own.

Best Film (Over 40min) Directed By Illum Jacobi

Stromboli

For many villagers of Stromboli, the volcano is both its Soul, and at the same time, a monster. And for some of them, the view of the volcano, was the last of their lives.

During the great eruptions of 1930… Maria lost her grandfather. For many years, Maria has hoped that Grandpa is still alive.
The fisherman, the philosopher, the cook… they're all dependent, bound to the mountain – a life in the unknown.

Best Film on Nature & Wildlife (Over 40min) - Hanspeter Aliesch

Scream

Everything starts with movement. The flow brought about by this sense of movement disrupts the whole, creates disintegration and makes nature talk. Every visible piece has become Mysterious. It contains the secrets and gives it to those who want to buy it, human beings just keep silent at this fascinating flow. The scream created by this fragmentation is now a moment of confrontation for each of us.

Best Film on Nature & Wildlife (Under 40min) - Directed By Ali ihtiyar

Night Hunt

A glamorous photo session ends up with a young model murdered by a deranged photographer who seems to hide sinister motives.

Next morning, a city worker finds two bodies in an alley behind the photo studio: the model and the photographer.

This mysterious double murder is the starting point for “Night Hunt”.

Chicago has a new enemy, an unstoppable killer that preys on his victims at night.

The authorities are not very interested in solving a crime that simply adds to the already troubled statistics of a violent city. To them, this is just more of the same.

However, Pilar and Shelley, a queer couple of intrepid reporters, seem to know better. They have found out that this is not an ordinary killer and ending his reign of terror will fall entirely on their shoulders.

As if fighting a blood-thirsty monster wasn’t enough, Pilar and Shelley will also have to face censorship and repression from a hostile establishment that is simply no interested in solving a crisis that seems to benefit their status quo.

A fast-paced violent horror movie with a social twist, Night Hunt is more than the story of a brutal killer roaming the streets of Chicago. It’s also the story of two restless warrioress to save the city they love.

Best Producer(Above 40min) - Ricardo Islas, Dagoberto Soto, Kristy Acosta, Clifton Wilson

In Absentia

On the morning of his wedding, just one week before his regiment is due to embark for the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe, Gunner Frank Swift is having second thoughts. What’s the point of tying the knot with the woman he loves if he’s only going to get blown to bits a few days later? As he wrestles with his conscience, he encounters an old man who tries to convince the young gunner to do the right thing and marry the love of his life. In parallel to this, some sixty years later, Maureen, worn out from years of caring for a father with declining dementia, arrives at the family home only to discover that he’s gone missing. Worried for his safety and well being, she knows things cannot stay as they are. Something has to change, but first she has to find him.

Best Film(Under 40min) - Directed By Charles Sharman-Cox

Bucky

A third date does not go as expected when Amy's lifelong friend Bucky confronts her date Peter.

Best Emerging Filmmaker (Under 40min) - Geoffrey Gould

Never Shake the Devil's hand

Elliot Capwell is a down and out private investigator who has a talent for finding himself in bad company and complicated situations, such as being caught between two rival gangs vying for control of the city’s underworld.

Best Animated Film(Under 40min) - Pierre Gregory

Love At First Chat

A woman, named Maria, Italian, 45 years old, single, decides to create a fake profile on one of the dating sites for fun. She is answered by a guy, Tega, 25-30 years old from Nigeria and they fall in love. One day a woman mistakenly accepts the videochat and the guy discovers that she is not a model, young and beautiful. Woman is already in love and is waiting for the calls and finally receives it. The relationship continues on its course until they make a decision that Tega is coming to Italy. Maria goes to meet her lover at the train station where a big surprise awaits her. The short film is about swindles or deceptions that some women suffer, especially in a situation of loneliness, by some men who take advantage of this weakness to get their purposes, either money or to achieve their goals, be it money or moving to another country. Unfortunately, this is a very current issue that is creating many relevant difficulties for many people.

Best Emerging Filmmaker(Under 40 min)- Olga If

LUCHA and the EKEKO

ELENA CRUZ-DOMINGUEZ—single, self-absorbed, and childless—is ready to retire and start a family. Given her middle-age, she decides to adopt. But in a pre-adoption foster-parenting test, the agency unexpectedly matches her up with LUCHA—a brash, tween, undocumented orphan. But it ain’t easy. Because Lucha represented all of Elena’s negative perceptions of undocumented migrants, sparks fly. And eventually Little Miss Orphan Badass proves too much for Elena in what turns out to be foster-parenting hell.

Before being dragged back to the agency, Lucha reveals how she and her mother were caught and separated from each other at the Texas border the year before. Then it becomes clear that Lucha is no orphan at all —but a “real life” casualty of the Family Separation policy. Though Elena starts out as an immigration hardliner, regarding the Zero-Tolerance crackdown as a necessary evil, at that moment, something clicks within her. And, throwing political rhetoric to the wind, she risks everything—making it her mission to reunite Lucha with her mother.

Now, on the run from ICE, her “mission” forces them to cross the southern border—breaking multiple laws—on a grueling trek where they must survive a series of dangerous obstacles and comic misadventures involving federal agents, bounty hunters, wild animals, and armed narco farmers.

Over the course of their trek, they bond. And, by journey’s end, Lucha finds her mother, and Elena learns what it means to become one.

Best Emerging Filmmaker -Animated (Under 40min) - Roger Edwards

It´s gonna be fine

At Christmas dinner undertaker Karsten is confronted with his parents' plan to commit suicide. He may be used to death, but still he does everything in his powers to stop his beloved mother Marion and his Parkison-suffering father Theodor. But while all his efforts seem doomed to fail he might at least find a new outlook to his own life.

Best Director (Over 40min) - Christian Werner

Tempest

After a night out in Long Beach a woman wakes up to find herself in a homeless tent along the L.A. River. Beside the tent lies a dead man.

Best Lead-Female (Under 40min) - Dina Fox

Hannah More

An epic tale of love and betrayal , set against a backdrop of revolution and slavery. A woman's fight against injustice and the turmoil of politics in the 18th Century.

Best Screenplay (Over 40min) - Anthea Page

Best Emerging Filmmaker - Diana Taylor