FILA 2020 Awards

Grand Jury Prize Winners

Best Feature Film – Collision
Best Short Film – Drama – The Bus to Birra Birra
Best Short Film – Comedy – Sofa Queen
Best Short Film – Horror – Stew
Best Short Film – Experimental/Arthouse – Kiko’s Saints
Best Documentary Feature Film – Comfort Farms
Best Documentary Short Film – Jessyca
Best Music Video – Nice Shoes
Best Director, Feature Film – Mehdi Avaz, Collision
Best Director, Short Film – TJ Power, The Bus to Birra Birra
Best Actress in a Lead Role – Camille Calvin, Desire Lines
Best Actor in a Lead Role – Doug Burch, DOUG
Best Actress in a Supporting Role – Cecilie Stenspil, Collision
Best Actor in a Supporting Role – Nigel Lysaght, Desire Lines
Best Performance by an Ensemble – Life’s A Bitch And Then One Kills You
Best Screenplay – Patrick Connolly & Nigel Lysaght, Desire Lines
Best Cinematography, Feature Film – Jonathan Latona, DOUG
Best Art Direction/Production Design – Gaëlle Usandivaras, Kiko’s Saints
Best Screenplay (Unproduced) – The Loser’s Club by Jonathan Turner Smith

Audience Award Winners

Audience Award, Feature Film – DOUG;   Lupe
Audience Award, Short Film – The Squirrels in the Attic
Audience Award, Documentary Film – Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America

Filmmakers Award Winners

Outstanding Short Film – Drama – Kama’āina (Child of the Land)
Outstanding Short Film – Comedy – Grief Vigilantes
Outstanding Short Film – Horror – Far Gone
Outstanding Short Film – Experimental/Arthouse – His Mother
Outstanding Short Film – Sci FI – Kids Don’t Die
Outstanding Directors – Kimi Howl Lee, Kama’āina (Child of the Land); Paul Maziere, Joseph Turns 42 (Or the Inconsistency of Wonders); Samuël L. Jodry, Bengal (or before happiness strikes)
Outstanding Screenplay – TJ Power, The Bus to Birra Birra
Outstanding Acting, Cast – Grief Vigilantes, Sofa Queen
Outstanding Acting, Individual – Elizabeth Blackmore, The Bus to Birra Birra; Malia Kamalani Soon, Kama’āina (Child of the Land); Nikki James, Sofa Queen
Outstanding Cinematography – Caroline Le Hello, Kiko’s Saints

Programmer’s Award Winners

Exceptional Films: Fantasmas (Ghosts), First States, Micky

Prize Definitions/Explanations

Grand Jury Prizes – determined by the festival’s official selection committee.
Audience Awards – determined by highly scientific instruments placed throughout the theater to determine audience satisfaction.
Filmmakers Awards – given only to short films, these are determined by a panel of fifteen filmmakers whose films have been Official Selections previous years.
Programmer’s Prize – given to film(s) that festival programmer Jeff Howard cannot bear to see go without an award. These are generally films that were runners-up in a bunch of categories and their general greatness deserves an award.

FILA 2020 Screenings

Nearly all of FILA 2020’s Official Selections will be viewable for one week right here in our Screening Room.

If you’ve been following FILA 2020 you might know that we had planned to run Livestreams with Live Q&A’s for our screenings. After many tests, we learned that there was too high a possibility that there would be freezing and stuttering of the films. To present the films in the best possible manner, we are pre-recording Q&A’s and then presenting feature films and blocks of short films followed by their respective Q&A’s in the FILA 2020 Screening Room.

We know that most viewers will come to see the work of someone that they know, but Team FILA can guarantee that if you stick around and watch some of the films you never heard of you are going to see terrific, well-made movies.

We hope everyone enjoys the 2020 Festival that had to be online instead of at the theater. We hope to see you at the theater next year!