Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature - My Name Is Myeisha (USA)

Director Gus Krieger; Writers Rickerby Hinds, Gus Krieger

​Narrative Feature

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A teenager crosses over into a hip-hop-musical dreamscape at the moment of her tragic death and contemplates her life: what it was and what it could have been. Spoken word, beatboxing, and hip-hop dance combine to tell the tragic story of nineteen-year-old Myeisha Jackson, and the fateful night she crossed paths with the police, in December of 1998. Based on the internationally-acclaimed stageplay Dreamscape by Rickerby Hinds.

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Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature Rock Steady Row (USA)

Director Trevor Stevens, Writer Bomani J. Story

West Coast Premiere

Narrative Feature

When a lone freshman arrives at Rock Steady University he discovers that the campus is controlled by two warring factions: Kappa Brutus Omega and The High Society. His bike is stolen and shuffled into the fraternities’ most valuable source of income, the bicycle market. Turning the University into more of a war zone than a place of education, the freshman plays the rival fraternities against one another to reclaim his stolen bicycle.

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Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature - White Tide: The Legend of Culebra (USA)

Director Theo Love

West Coast Premiere

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Rodney is an American dreamer. His glass is not only half full, but it's half full of the finest wine you've ever tasted. But when the great recession wipes out his construction business in Central Florida, his family faces a nightmare of debt. One evening around a campfire, Rodney hears a story from an old, barefooted hippy that just might solve his family's problems. There's an island. There's a map. And there's buried treasure...$2 million dollars just waiting for someone to dig it up. Rodney is hooked. But there's just one slight, itty-bitty problem...he doesn't have a shovel. Oh, and the $2 million dollars just happens to be in cocaine form.

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Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature Crime + Punishment (USA)

Director Stephen Maing

Documentary

Stephen Maing's documentary about the NYPD's illegal policing quotas and other discriminatory practices gets the blood boiling. This unnerving documentary about the New York City Police Department's harmful, money-grubbing methods spans the years 2014 through late 2017, though the corruption it tackles head-on has long been a staple of an organization that purports to exercise Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect.

Bravery Award - Minding the Gap (USA)

Director Bing Liu

Documentary

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First-time filmmaker Bing Liu’s documentary Minding the Gap is a coming-of-age saga of three skateboarding friends in their Rust Belt hometown hit hard by decades of recession. In his quest to understand why he and his friends all ran away from home when they were younger, Bing follows 23-year-old Zack as he becomes a father and 17-year-old Keire as he gets his first job. As the film unfolds, Bing is thrust into the middle of Zack’s tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend and Keire’s inner struggles with racial identity and his deceased father. While navigating a complex relationship between his camera and his friends, Bing explores the gap between fathers and sons, between discipline and domestic abuse, and ultimately that precarious chasm between childhood and becoming an adult.

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Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature Buddha.mov (India)

Director Kabir Mehta

West Coast Premiere

Documentary

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Lured by the chance of being the protagonist of a documentary film, Buddha Dev, a 27 year old flamboyant cricketer from Goa, starts authorising unrestricted access into the most private parts of his life.

NOTE: For Mature Audiences.

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Jury Award for Best International Feature Tower. A Bright Day (Poland)

Director Jagoda Szelc

​Foreign Narrative Feature

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Mula lives with her family in the country. Just before her daughter's First Holy Communion, Mula's long lost sister pays them a visit. The family believes in reconciliation, but Mula has her reasons to feel afraid of Kaja.

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Honorable Mention for his Performance in the International Narrative Feature Vidar the Vampire Thomas Aske Berg (Norway)

Directors Thomas Aske Berg, Fredrik Waldeland

​Foreign Narrative Feature

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A Christian farmer searching for a higher purpose to life falls into sin and wakes up as the Prince of Darkness in the city of Stavanger, Norway.

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Jury Award for Best Narrative Short Shadow Animals (Sweden)

Director Jerry Carlson

Narrative Short

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Shadow animals is a dance-based drama about the discovery of human behavior.

Jury Award for Best Documentary Short David & the Kingdom (USA)

Directors Woodrow Travers, Brian Paccione

World Premiere​

Narrative Short

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After rehabilitating two abandoned baby moose, David Lawrence vows to never harm another living thing. When tragedy strikes, David is forced to confront a violent past that transforms a story of redemption into a meditation on human contradiction.

Jury Award for Best Animated Short Cocoon, Cocoon (Israel)

Directors Ori Goldberg, Ilai Margulies

West Coast Premiere

Animated Short

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A fat, smug caterpillar doesn't want to become a butterfly. In song and rhyme, the horrors of metamorphosis are revealed.

Honorable Mention for Narrative Short Babies (Israel)

Director Yuval Shapira

North American Premiere

Narrative Short

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A young single mother leaves her crying infant at home in the middle of the night to go and buy baby formula.

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Honorable Mention for Narrative Short In a Month (Denmark)

Director Jonas Kærup Hjort

Narrative Short

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In a factory in the middle of nowhere a group of workers is waiting, indefinitely. Every full moon a telephone rings. Always with the same message: Be patient. We are on our way. When the foreman chooses to end his life, the group is left alone with no authority other than the telephone. Gradually routines start to vanish and the group gets another view on life. Until it goes too far...

Honorable Mention for Animation Short Nevada (USA)

Director Emily Ann Hoffman

Animated Short

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A young couple's romantic weekend is interrupted by a birth control mishap in this stop-motion animated comedy