Festival Awards:
Best Film: SPOKESPEOPLE
Best Cinematography: SANTRA – A TALE OF INDIA
Best Sound & Music: CLERC’S INFERNO: FROM PAGE TO SIGN
Watch the Audience Feedback Videos for each film:
SPOKESPEOPLE, 24min., USA
Directed by Ryan Mekenian
For Los Angeles natives living in the early 1900’s, bicycles and streetcars shared the road as our primary modes of transportation. But the arrival of the freeway effectively wiped them out. Today, a collective of cycling communities fight for protected bike lanes and road safety; determined to bring a new era of mobility justice to the city.
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SANTRA – A TALE OF INDIA, 10min., Australia
Directed by Maxim Zhuiykov
This film presents my impressions on how I felt while traveling through India featuring footage of people, places and landscapes.
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WELCOME HOME NED AND WENDY, 11min, USA
Directed by Lindsey Ferguson, Jordan Plotner
“Welcome Home Ned and Wendy” is the real-life love story of two artists on opposite sides of the country who, through remote musical collaboration, radical vulnerability, and an unexpected fifteen months in quarantine, find their way home to one-another. But the love story doesn’t end with their declarations of shared feelings, nor does it end when the two lovers finally meet in person. This is a love story that goes beyond the fairytale ending, the grand gestures and honeymoon phase, and captures the joys, fears, pain, and anxieties of a young couple learning to love each other and themselves unconditionally, while living with physical disability and mental illness, in a world shaken by pandemic and politics, and on top of all of that, doing everything they can to realize a dream larger than they could have ever imagined on their own: the creation of a musical documentary that will allow them to share the music, art, poetry, and spirit of “Ned and Wendy” with the world.
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DEATH. EVERYTHING. NOTHING, 6min., USA
Directed by LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant
Separated by distance, time, and a pandemic, a daughter wrestles with her mother’s impending death.
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CLERC’S INFERNO: FROM PAGE TO SIGN, 14min., UK
Directed by Rod Jorge
Clerc’s Inferno is a two-act play about Laurent Clerc and Thomas Gallaudet and their quest to take Sign Language education to America in the early 19th century.
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SHARED EARTH, 10min., Canada
Directed by RJ Bruni
A story about a ceramic artist, Cathy Terepocki, and her journey to find purpose within her work. When most artists are seeking to further put themselves at the forefront of their work Cathy made a conscious decision to actually remove her personal touch.
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SERGE HOLLERBACH: A RUSSIAN PAINTER IN NEW YORK, 25min., USA, Documentary
Directed by A’Dora Phillips, Brian Schumacher
In this short documentary film, the Russian emigre painter Serge Hollerbach, who is legally blind, creates two paintings, separated in time by a period of four years during which he has visibly aged and his vision has declined. While painting, he discusses art, his displacement during World War II, building a new life in New York City, and how vision loss has affected his ability to paint.
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Documentary Film Festival. Los Angeles & Toronto 