Festival ends with awards, Hitchcock

From The Orlando Weekly, April 16, 2018

The 27th annual Florida Film Festival ended this weekend with an awards presentation and party on Saturday and a 75th anniversary screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt on Sunday.

Executive Director David Schillhammer presided over the awards ceremony at Maitland’s Enzian Theater, at which 12 prizes were presented.

For narrative feature films, the Grand Jury Award went to Savage Youth while the audience voted for Prison Logic. The Special Jury Award for Performance went to Christina Parrish and Andrew Dismukes for Call Me Brother.

Among feature documentaries, TransMilitary took home the Grand Jury Award while My Indiana Muse won over the audience. The Last Race won the Special Jury Award for Artistic Vision.

The features might get more attention, but it’s actually the shorts that have more riding on the awards, as the three Grand Jury Award winners are now eligible for Academy Award consideration. The Florida Film Festival is one of only about two-dozen festivals worldwide with Oscar accreditation in all shorts categories: live-action narrative, documentary and animated.

The Grand Jury Awards for best live-action narrative and best animated shorts were surprises, with Flatbush Misdemeanors picking up the former prize and Shahkboy winning the latter. The Grand Jury Award for best documentary short was given to The Tables. And Caroline received a Special Jury Award for direction.

The audience picked Let My People Vote as the best overall short, out of 59 that were eligible. (Many shorts – including several foreign-language ones, those with distribution deals and ones that were eligible for Academy Awards last year – were screened out of competition, as were the Spotlight features.)

Hair Wolf took home the audience award for best Midnight short.

© 2018 Orlando Weekly / MeierMovies, LLC