2018 Award Winners

Best Animated Short: White Lilacs

Directed by Alex Bernas - UK

Flowers, family, and friends. A meditation on the relationship between parents and their children.

Best Student Short: Hideaway

Directed by Cal Croft - Australia

Two boys battle imaginary monsters together, but soon one's violent home life is exposed and it is up to his friend to intervene.

Best Documentary Short: Lotte That Silhouette Girl

Directed by Elizabeth Beecherl & Carla Patullo - USA

Once upon a time, long before Disney and other animation giants, Lotte Reiniger ignited the screen with shadows, light, and a pair of magical scissors.

Best Narrative Short: A Reasonable Man

Directed by Sydney Ribot - Filmed in China/Turkey

At a private party in Beijing, a German banker meets a local writer who might help him transcend his alienation. Yet as he begins to truly see the woman, he’s left with a secret—an emotion—that threatens to isolate him further.

Best Documentary Feature: Mr. Fish: Cartooning from the Deep End  

Directed by Pablo Bryant - USA

Mr. Fish, once a successful, outrageous editorial cartoonist, finds that his profession is dying out. Can he raise a family and maintain his defiant voice when biting satiric humor has an ever diminishing commercial value?  

Best Narrative Feature: Chimera

Directed by Maurice Haeems - USA/UAE/India

A brilliant but disturbed scientist freezes his children alive, while he races to cure their deadly genetic disease by decoding the DNA of the immortal Turritopsis jellyfish.

Burt Reynolds Best in Show Short: Peggy

Directed by Justin O’Neal Miller - USA

Everything seems to work out perfectly for Peggy, but her social graces are put to the test when she is surrounded by admiring and covetous parents at a birthday party for her eight-year-old son.

Burt Reynolds Best in Show Feature: White Tide: The Legend of Culebra

Directed by Theo Love - USA

Rodney Hayden and his plan, fueled by a combination of economic desperation and blissful ignorance, to retrieve a possibly mythical $2-million stash of cocaine from its reported Caribbean hiding place.

Audience Choice Award Short: The Emissary

Directed by Bryan Tan - USA

Liv Laika departs from her life, her love, and from the aging earth in search of her ancestor's people, who fled the earth nearly a century prior.

Audience Choice Award Feature: To Kingdom Come

Directed by Brian Campbell - USA

A classic case of environmental injustice, the decades-long interaction between GE and Rome, Georgia, with cultural history references reinforcing the power of media to affect our perceptions of our landscapes and dominant corporations.