WINNER
Jeremy Thao // Wokman
“Settling into his new responsibilities at his family’s Chinese restaurant, an American-born Chinese boy seeks to better understand his immigrant father’s vision of the American Dream while facing his own challenges from behind the cash register.”
RUNNER UP
Madison Hatfield // Post-Citrus
“The fat bassist of an otherwise thin girl punk band must stand up for herself when her friend and bandleader suggests wearing orange peels as bikini cups during their album cover shoot.”
Mark Kendall and Bill Worley // Shark Song
“A kind and gentle shark uses song to lament the target society has wrongly and systematically placed on his back, and he becomes a metaphor for the treatment of black people in America.”
A.K. Espada // I Could Just Die, and That Would Be All Right
“Wanting to end her life, a depressed housewife offers herself to a mysterious creature in the woods. But after surviving the attack, she begins to fear she may now be doomed to live forever.”
Connor Christensen // Growth
“An internet sleuth is confronted with his upstairs neighbor’s growing secret, an all-consuming fungus that soon seeps into his apartment.”
Adetinpo Thomas // The Earth Will Not Swallow Us
“A first-gen interracial couple of Yoruba and Indian descent waiver under the cultural pressure to start a family while privately struggling with infertility.”
Hannah Alline // Rectitude
“Georgia, 1946: RECTITUDE follows Einin, a young woman of righteous upbringing, who faces a reckoning of faith when she befriends a traveling preacher.”
Tim Glover // Alex & MOR: A Love Story of the 22nd Century
“Marooned on the moon in the distant future, an astronaut and an AI celebrate their anniversary.”
Jon Wierenga // Luba
“In 1812 Russia, an alienated young serf girl discovers an injured, starving enemy soldier in a barn. As she sneaks him food and tries to keep him hidden from the tyrannical landlord, the line blurs between enemy and friend.”
