Florida Film Festival reveals awards

From The Orlando Weekly, April 22, 2019

The Florida Film Festival announced most of its awards over the weekend, with Chained for Life, directed by Aaron Schimberg, taking the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature and Nancy Schwartzman’s Roll Red Roll picking up the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Postal, directed by Tyler Falbo, won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature.

The Interpreters, directed by Andres Caballero and Sofian Khan, won the Special Jury Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking while David Hambridge’s Kifaru collected the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Tayler Buck, from Princess of the Row, won the Special Jury Award for Outstanding Performance, and Alix Lambert, director of Edge of Daybreak and Prison Zoo, received the Female Filmmaker to Watch Award.

The features usually get most of the attention, but it’s the awards for short films that matter more, as the Florida Film Festival is Oscar accredited in all three shorts categories (narrative, documentary and animation). This means the grand-jury winners in those categories now qualify for consideration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short went to Lockdown, directed by Celine Held and Logan George; the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short was presented to Departing Gesture, by Brian Bolster and Jonathan Napolitano; and Ana Perez Lopez’s Las Del Diente picked up the Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short.

The Special Jury Award for Innovative Storytelling went to Technology Lake: Meditations on Death and Sex, by Brandon Daley, while The Next Edition, by Alice Li and Whitney Shefte, collected the

Audience Award for Best Short Film. Chowboys: An American Folktale, by Astron-6, won the Audience Award for Best Midnight Short.

The festival announced all the aforementioned winners on Saturday night at the awards bash at Oliver’s Classic Cars in Winter Park. International filmmakers had to wait until Monday, with the Audience Award for Best International Feature going to Abu Bakr Shawky’s Yomeddine and the Audience Award for Best International Short going to Yves Piat’s Nefta Football Club.

© 2019 Orlando Weekly / MeierMovies, LLC

Oh, and here’s some (really bad) 16mm footage I shot at this year’s festival.