BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE

What Children Do by Dean Peterson

A comedy about two estranged sisters who are thrust back into each other’s lives by the impending death of their grandmother and forced to try to repair their feral relationship.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Better Together by Isaac Hernandez

Community Makes the Difference

The response to a horrendous oil blowout fifty years ago in Santa Barbara sparked the modern environmental movement, creating a culture that continues to inspire local solutions to global problems.

The 1969 Union Oil blowout mobilized the Santa Barbara community to fight for the environment, inspiring nonprofit organizations into existence, as well as Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency and the first interdisciplinary Environmental Studies program, at UCSB. The legacy of the oil spill continues to inform this community, which keeps coming together, providing local solutions to global environmental problems; such as when over 3,000 volunteers joined the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade to dig the mud from homes after the deadly 2018 debris flow.

BEST SHORT NARRATIVE

Hunting Season by Shannon Kohli

Callie (Hannah Levien), is a small town gas station attendant at a crossroads in her life. A recovering alcoholic, she is struggling to move on from her past in her blue-collar community. When a violent creature escapes from a group of local hunters, it happens upon her at the station. Callie comes face to face with the beast and the demons of her past. An unlikely bond between the beast and Callie will change her life forever, forcing her to face and conquer her fears.

BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY

Antes do Lembrar by Luciana Mazeto &Vinícius Lopes

In the first evidences of mankind in the south of Brazil we meet, side by side, the visible and the invisible parts of a story.

BEST ANIMATION

Resurge by Ying Ling Chen

The story is about a little girl who travels in after world with the guardian rabbit.

BEST EXPERIMENTAL

Pig Film by Josh Gibson

In an empty world, a solitary female mechanically follows the protocols of a factory hog farm. Her labors are sporadically punctuated by musical rhapsodies as she moves toward the impending end. Is it the end of the world, a program malfunction, or the beginning of a film?

BEST STUDENT FILM

Calamity Falls by Hadley Hillel

After the sudden death of her parents, a young girl finds a portal to an alternate world in which they are still alive and must choose whether to live with them or stay with her brother.

BEST MICRO FILM

El País de la Eterna Primavera by Boaz Dvir

A silent era, ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ tale of a budding romance between rich and poor, upper class and lower class, retold over a quintessential British ritual, High Tea.