Summer 2022


SUMMER 2022 | Festival Laurels (all categories + nomination laurel + special mention laurel)

JURY PRIZE

Winner: Forbidden Love on the Shores of Greece

“It has a memorable air about it. It is stylish, graceful and well-designed. The sound provides a great understanding of texture which is matched by the bold and glowy photography. Thankfully, the performances are just as engaging… this is a delight from start ‘till end.” 

Nominatees: Rage Fear Love, Sunpuddle, The Bench, Participant, Frequency


FILM 

  • Ukraine Film Entries 

The End of the World – Nominated: Best Ensemble Cast – “The film has a great cast which really delve deep into the morals of the situational scenes.” 

Hope overcomes everything – Nominated: Best Genre – “A great little animation film.” 

Attack of the Furry Fish – Nominated: Best Score – “The music is timely and adds to the impact of the short film.” 

Protocol – Nominated: Best Technique (Screenplay Category) – “The script is well presented and enhanced with interesting visuals.” 

Kateryna – Winner: Best Editing (Shared) – “The film uses editing as a tool with which to enhance the story – it helps to unlock a deeper meaning to the film’s content.” 

Sunpuddle – Nominated: Best Director – “This surreal film is really quite freaky in a beautiful way.” 

  • Best Short Film – Less than $5,000

ScumSucker – Nominated: Best Editing, Winner: Best Actor (Christopher Birks) – “Buzzling with fucks, this short is a cool actor rant sliced carefully with style.” 

Keep on Climbing – Special Mention: Best LGBTQ+ Film, Nominated: Best Director, Nominated: Best Ensemble Cast  – “Stylish with its delivery, this almost feature film is quite moving with character and consistent with tone and content. It’s enjoyable to watch, and feels intimate.”

The Burden – Nominated: Best Film made for less than $5,000, Nominated: Best Cinematography – “The short delights with a plush image of various different locales, and defiantly pushes the boundaries of what can do with such a limited budget. Impressive production values.” 

Frequency – Winner: Best Cinematography, Nominated: Best Film made for less than $5,000, Nominated: Best Genre Film – “The film carries a great sense of style and a rich image.” 

The Cleverest Thief – Nominated: Best Actress (Libby Wattis) – “Wattis does a great job of carefully navigating the situational isolation and upset quite well.” 

History of the Music Hall – Winner: Best Genre Film – “Entertaining and well just a hoot.” 

Brave – Nominated: Best Director – “The camera angle choices do a great job to enhance the film’s content and bring the audience’s attention to a particular perspective.” 

In The End – Winner: Best Director, Nominated: Best Cinematography – “Shot with great passion and understanding for the cinematic image, this short carries a dark fable in its heart… it’s haunting and memorable.” 

Ms. Davis’ Close Friend – Nominated: Best Actor (Trey G Riley) – “Walking a thin line between the buddy film genre and flat-out fantasy, this film finds a great dynamic between its two lead performers, largely offset by Riley’s minimalist approach.” 

Lax Bros – Nominated: Best Screenplay, Nominated: Best Ensemble Cast – “For a young cast, this feels like a great project… it could do with a strong cinematic injection throughout – a bolder visual style or a particular grade… but overall, the sense of plotting via the script and the overall dynamics delivered through the cast is of a particular genre type – and it is quite well delivered in this tone.” 

Do I? – Winner: Best Editing (Shared) – “The film’s sense of an enigma and mystery is largely built around its strong and well-paced edit. This film’s breathing space is its strength. We ‘feel’ the decisions being made.” 

The Left Trail – Nominated: Best Actress (Diana Doci), Nominated: Best Actress (Jazmine Wilkinson) – “The film is very simple, but very moving… and the two leads bring a great sense of chemistry and maintain their performance in a great style. It feels genuine.” 

The Bench – Winner: Best Film made for less than $5,000 – “The cast do a great job here at keeping the script well paced, but it is the handling of the film’s budget which is quite fun… it feels quite robust despite the small nest.” 

Now What? – Nominated: Best Screenplay, Nominated: Best Actor (Riley Murphy), Winner: Best Score – “Comical and well setup, this is an original comedy led greatly by its lead actor. The music is original and punchy.” 

Participant – Nominated: Best Director – “This film carries a great sense of genre and tension through this.” 

Pumpkin Eater – Nominated: Best Film made for less than $5,000 – “This Western-styled short carries a great sense of humor, all the while presenting itself as a bold stylish short film.” 

  • Best Short Film – Between $5,000-$10,000

Hollywood Post 43’s Last Stand – Nominated: Best Genre Film, Nominated: Best Screenplay, Winner: Best Ensemble Cast, Nominated: Best Short Between $5,000-$10,000 – “Fantastic comedic blend of genre, creativity and just a heap tonne of bloody fun. The cast is a great self-aware moment here.” 

Mama’s Watching – Winner: Best Screenplay, Nominated: Best Director, Nominated: Best Actress (Rose Muirhead) – “The presentation of Muirhead’s dense script is quite impressive. Her writing combines several narrative devices in a short amount of time: flashback, voice over and a blend of social issues all wrapped up in a genre coating. The characterizations at moments feel more like caricatures… but when it comes to short films that is somewhat expected (they are so short in terms of what they can show us for supporting roles and their motivations). Nicely polished with a keen eye for photographic and editorial quality, the short is enhanced by the cast’s great job in inhabiting these moments and ensuring they are naturalistic, especially leading lady (and writer) Rose Muirhead.”

Haze – Winner: Best Short Between $5,000-$10,000 – “The music is at times rather distracting, but the overall film is well designed with a strong interest in tone, performance and locations. It contains a nice range for its budget.” 

Like a PowerPoint – Nominated: Best Actress (Melanie Gretchen) – “This could have easily been expanded into a feature film, mainly thanks to the core character and the naturalistic performance of ‘Emma’.” 

Forbidden Love on the Shores of Greece – Winner: Best Actress (Holly De Jong), Nominated: Best Director, Nominated: Best Cinematography, Nominated: Best Editing – “A very well-rounded short film which takes its time to really enjoy the tone, style and scenario it is setting up. The art direction, along with the lush cinematography, frame a world inhabited by an energetic and loveable cast – greatly topped by De Jong’s bold performance. This is one of the best shorts of the year.” 

  • Best Feature – Less than $5,000

Recollecting – Para não esquecer – Nominted: Best Editing, Nominated: Best Music, Nominated: Best Feature – Less than $5,000 – “This sobering documentary has a great sense of time and persona, largely shaped by the use of sympathetic music and careful editing.” 

Rage, Fear, Love – Winner: Best Feature – Less than $5,000, Nominated: Best Ensemble Cast – “It’s rare to see a cast enjoy the quirky script in the indie scene… and evenmoreso, the nature of this film’s smart use ofa minimalist budget often feels well balanced and never out of character with what it is trying to achieve – which is to say it is a carefully assembled piece.”  

  • Best Feature – More than $10,000

I Am Not A Hero – Winner: Best Feature – More than $10,000, Nominated: Best Screenplay, Nominated: Best Cinematography – “The film enjoys its intimate moments with great awareness… the tone is consistent, and often expressive – impressively executed for a feature film.”

Sifting – Nominated: Best Actress (Lead), Nominated: Best Feature – More than $10,000 – “Brown’s film makes great use of the locations… but at its heart, the core performance of his lead actress is what really leads this film to great heights. There is a strong sense of character, her situation and the journey she is on. It recalls the likes of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy by the great minimalist Kelly Reichdardt.”

Web series

Style Central – Nominated: Best Genre Film – “This energetic cast heavy webseries bubbles with a great sense of genre and enjoyment of comedy.” 

Iron Nest of the Moon – Winner: Best Webseries – “Entertaining, fun and very robust in design.” 

Pointing the Wrong Direction – Nominated: Best Webseries, Nominated: Best Screenplay – “A strange blend of genre and film formats… It’s quite enjoyable, and very philisophical.” 


MUSIC VIDEO

Safe Journey – Winner: Best Music Video, Nominated: Best Editing – “Beautifully shot, and with a lot of meaningful imagery – this music video is engaging, memorable, and beautiful to experience.” 

Goldfish – Nominated: Best Music Video, Winner: Best Editing – “Comedic, entertaining and even character lead (which is rare for music videos) this music video holds your attention and keeps you guessing for the next creative split screen edit.”

Medusa – Nominated: Best Editing – “A collage of ideas unfold in this music video. It’s a creative use of some serious special in-camera effects… all spliced together to make a maze.”


SCRIPT COMPETITION

Crude – Winner: Best Technique – “Written with a strong elegant and clean presentation, Simpson’s script gets to the heart of it’s character dynamics with a memorable and situation sense of comedy.”

Should Have Waited – Nominated: Best Genre – “It feels too long for a short, but too short for a feature… but at its heart, there’s a strong sense of a subgenre: the character lead mental-health conscious drama. It is an important genre to be had, and with the right team at hand (and maybe a short/longer format) it will be a great film for many to enjoy and be moved by.”

4 – Winner: Best Genre – “The unusual use of voice-over as a narrative technique recalls Andrew Niccol’s work, in particular the likes of The Host and Anon – it’s instantly cinematic, and will be interesting to see once filmed.”

War Criminal – Winner: Best Character Arc, Nominated: Best Technique – “The script has a great sense of epicness to it – actors would relish this experiences, as there’s a lot of dialogue to chew away and invest in.”

Bad Love Tigers – Nominated: Best Technique, Nominated: Best Genre, Nominated: Best Character Arc – “There’s a lot to love here – it is a market-ready film that would suit a poster and it is very well polished. It perhaps though, at times, feels like a series of films we’ve already seen, with some fun cheesy lines thrown in and blended together. But it is very well executed and well balanced.”