SCAD Announces Savannah Film Festival Award Winners

SAVANNAH, GA -- The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) announced the award winners for the 17th annual Savannah Film Festival during closing night held at the SCAD Trustees Theater. Thirteen awards were announced from the 55 films that competed in the categories of narrative features, documentary features, professional shorts, student shorts, professional animation shorts, student animation shorts, student live action, shorts from Ireland and supernatural shorts. The winners will receive more than $80,000 in cash and prizes.

Narrative and Documentary Features

• Best Narrative Feature: Amira & Sam -- An army veteran struggles to assimilate back into a country he barely recognizes while trying to win the heart of an Iraqi immigrant who is teetering on the brink of deportation. Director, Sean Mullin.
• Best Director: Frank Hall Green, Wildlike -- An unlikely friendship forms in the spectacular Alaskan wilderness, giving a runaway girl hope and sanctuary in America's last frontier.
• Best Documentary: Ice Warriors: USA Sled Hockey - Military veterans play alongside teenagers in this gripping look at members of the U.S. Sled Hockey team who play for pride and country. The stories are filled with tough competition and spiritual uplift as the team represents the U.S. at the Paralympic Games. Director, Brian Knappenberger.
• HBO Films Producer Award 2014: Limited Partnership -- The love story between Filipino-American Richard Adams and Australian Tony Sullivan, who, in 1975, became one of the first same-sex couples in the world to be legally married. This tenacious story of love, marriage and immigration equality is as precedent setting as it is little known ... until now. Director, Thomas G. Miller.

Shorts

• Best Short: The Karman Line -- When a mother is affected by a rare condition that causes her to lift off the ground at a slow but ever-increasing rate, her husband and daughter are forced to come to terms with losing her. Director, Oscar Sharp.
• Best Animated Film: The Looking Planet -- During the construction of the universe, a young member of the Cosmos Corps of Engineers decides to break some fundamental laws in the name of self-expression. Director, Eric Law Anderson.
• Special Jury Award: The Gunfighter -- In the tradition of classic Westerns, a narrator sets up the story of a lone gunslinger who walks into a saloon. However, the people in this saloon can hear the narrator and the narrator is a bit of a jerk. Director, Eric Kissack.
• Best World Short Ireland: Boogaloo and Graham -- In 1970s Belfast, two young boys are over the moon when their soft-hearted dad presents them with two baby chicks to care for, but they are in for a shock when their parents announce big changes coming to the family. Director, Michael Lennox.
• Best Supernatural Short: We Wanted More -- A psychological thriller about a singer who loses her voice on the precipice of her first world tour, We Wanted More is a hypnotic fever dream about the sacrifices a young artist makes for her career.
• Best Editing: Bis Gleich (Till Then) -- An unspoken connection between two elderly neighbors, who share a daily ritual but who have never actually met, deepens when they face the inevitable -- together. Director, Benjamin Wolff.

Student Awards

• HBO Films Student Competition Award 2014: Sweet Corn Bong-Moo, an old, stubborn farmer, takes extraordinary measures to save his corn field and gets surprising results. Director, Joo Hyun Lee.
• Best SCAD Student Competition Award: Southsouthwest An introverted photo enthusiast, tormented by local bullies, is faced with a test of courage when his ailing grandfather's camera is stolen and placed at the top of a fire tower. Director, Madison Hamburg.
• Silver Screen Society Award: Southsouthwest

Jury members for the contest included Juliet Blake (Producer/TED Content Producer), Evan Dunsky (writer/director/producer), Laura Kim (SVP Film Marketing, Participant Media), Ted Mundorff (CEO/President, Landmark Theaters), Chris Nashawaty (Film Critic, Entertainment Weekly) and Randi Peck (Entertainment Director, Interview Magazine). Student and other shorts jury members included Andrew Crane (American Cinematheque), Michael James (KTLA 5 News) and Alicia Lipinski (DigitalFilm Tree).

The 17th annual festival -- held in downtown Savannah, Georgia, from Oct. 25-Nov. 1 -- gathered a diverse group of industry professionals from all fields of the business to participate in a panel and Q&A discussions on several topics about the film, television and digital media business. Additional highlights from this year’s event included:

• Premiere screenings of 5 to 7, Big Hero 6, Escobar: Paradise Lost, Foxcatcher, The Homesman, The Humbling, The Imitation Game, Two Days, One Night and Whiplash.
• Matt Bomer received the Spotlight Award; Asa Butterfield and Analeigh Tipton received Rising Star Awards; and Gena Rowlands received the Lifetime Achievement Award.
• The Docs to Watch series featured several top must-see documentaries from this year that are gaining award season attention. Docs in this program included Documented, Finding Vivian Maier, Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, Keep On Keepin’ On, Life Itself, Merchants of Doubt, Red Army, The Salt of the Earth, and Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon. Eight of the attending filmmakers participated in a Q&A for their respective films and a panel moderated by Scott Feinberg, awards columnist for The Hollywood Reporter.
• Variety Contender Conversations were held with The Homesman cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and Foxcatcher production designer Jess Gonchor.
• Other guests who attended SCAD and the festival included J. Alexander, HBO Films president Len Amato, Stephen Boss, CAA’s Tracy Brennan, Kim Campbell, Nick Cassavetes, Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Simon Halls, Zach Gilford, Donald Glover, Shep Gordon, Jorge Guiterrez, James Keach, Victor Levin, Joe Manganiello, Mike Myers, Kevin Nash, Norman Reedus, Adam Rodriguez, Jane Seymour, Adam Shankman, André Leon Talley and many others.

Source: Savannah College of Art and Design

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.