Superfest International Disability Film Festival


SUPERFEST XXVI WINNERS

Congratulations to this year's award winners!

The following contains a list and descriptions of the award winners for SUPERFEST XXVI (2006). You can download a screening schedule for the event by clicking here, or if you would like an e-mail or hard copy mailed to you or have any questions regarding Superfest, please contact us at, [email protected]

Superfest XXVI Award Winners' List


Best of Festival

Excellence Awards

Achievement Awards

Merit Awards

Spirit Award

Pamela K. Walker Award

Emerging Artist Award

 

Description of Award Winners

( CC= CLOSED CAPTIONED; OC= OPEN CAPTIONED)

BEST OF FESTIVAL: Wood Diary
Producer: David Edwin Meyers
Director: David Edwin Meyers
Contact: David Edwin Meyers: [email protected]
Artist David Edwin Myers' gentle, dreamlike interpretation of the life of Walker Woods, an isolated rural artist with a disability, who creates haunting wood figures, is a transcendent and shimmering reflection on the beauty of ritual and the power of unconditional love and commitment. Using silent, snowy landscapes, intimate camera angles and a delicate, evocative score, Myers gives us a stunning, visual poem that attests to the value of the unexamined life.

EXCELLENCE AWARD: About Love OC
Producer: Tofik Shakhverdiev
Director: Tofik Shakhverdiev
Contact: Denise Roza: [email protected]
A popular documentary in Russia, it is comprised of a series of humorous, unsentimental interviews of Moscow primary schoolchildren with disabilities about their surprisingly rich love lives. Varied in their disabilities and home lives, these charmingly loquacious children all have in common deeply held opinions about love, their large number of boyfriends and girlfriends and the most effective approaches to courtship. Skilled director, Tofik Shakhverdiev's, camera never looks down upon the children and so it's their world we enter, allowing them the freedom to be exactly who they are: natural and tenacious storytellers.

EXCELLENCE AWARD: Braindamadj'd...Take II
Producer: Jonathan Finkelstein
Director: Paul Nadler
Contact: Elena Richards: [email protected]
This bold, unconventional documentary tracks the intense, uphill journey of American filmmaker, Paul Nadler, to recover and reclaim his life after an accident resulting in a severe brain injury. Part traditional documentary, part journey into the rabbit hole, this is a film within a film: self-reflexive, unflinchingly honest, and a manic and frequently disturbing look into the creative mind's power to reinvent itself.

ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: I'm Spazticus
Producers: Jamie O'Leary, Richard Hague
Director: Jamie O'Leary
Contact: Jamie O'Leary: [email protected]
A politically incorrect, in-your-face, bladder challengingly funny British "Punk'd" style television special with disabled pranksters making fun of the assumptions and prejudices of an unsuspecting public. These "take no prisoners" wiseasses are clearly having a blast skewering, lampooning, and ridiculing their way around London. They're utterly fresh and deliciously rude.

ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: One Strong Arm
Producers: Loren Mendell, Tiller Russell
Director: Loren Mendell, Tiller Russell
Contact: Nicole Johnson: [email protected]
A central Valley "Rocky" story about a teenager who works out until he's got one arm strong enough to be a contender in mainstream arm wrestling matches. This pitch perfect little gem that takes a look at familial unconditional love and support is inspiring in the best sense of that word.

ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: The Man Who Couldn't Dance
Producer: Jan Haynes
Director: Barry Prescott
Contact: Barry Prescott: [email protected]
Director Barry Prescott mines inspired performances from his superb cast of clowns in this brilliant short farce that arrives at Monty Pythonesque solutions to the ballroom dancing aspirations of a man without legs. An outrageous and hilarious riff on "recreation for the handicapped", it's easy to understand why this sly comedy was voted audience favorite at Munich's 2005 international festival on the theme, "The Way We Live."

MERIT AWARD: 39 Pounds of Love
Producer: Dani Menkin
Director: Dani Menkin
Contact: Dani Menkin: [email protected]
This documentary centers on the international roadtrip of Ami, an Israeli man disabled with Spinal Muscular Atrophy who wants to see the world and also confront the U.S. doctor who told his mother he would not survive childhood. Now well into his thirties, Ami embarks on a revelatory journey across the United States to find the doctor who pronounced his death sentence, to reconcile with his estranged brother, and to forget the woman who got away. Animation, interviews, and roadtrip footage are masterfully interwoven to tell this emotionally charged, spellbinding story.

MERIT AWARD: Abnormally Funny People CC
Producers: Jane Stephenson, Simon Minty
Director: Al Edirinsinghe
Contact: Jane Stephenson: [email protected]
What happens when five performers with a variety of disabilities and stage experience and one non-disabled comic decide to put together a show for the demanding and unforgiving Edinburgh Fringe Festival? Through the use of both rehearsal and performance footage, Abnormally Funny People answers that question while giving us a chance to get to know some genuinely funny folks along the way.

MERIT AWARD: Are the Kids Alright?
Producers: Karen Bernstein, Ellen Spiro
Directors: Karen Bernstein, Ellen Spiro
Contact: Nicole Johnson: [email protected]
This powerful and informative documentary takes an alarming look at the threadbare U.S. mental health system, particularly in responding to children and adolescents from minority groups or in high risk situations. By pointing its lens at the Texas juvenile mental health system that traps children with emotional disabilities in an unimaginable game of funding, liability, and ethics, Are the Kids Alright? is both cautionary and enlightening. At times heartbreaking, it is a film that requires us to face an unsettling future and to ask the question, "What then must we do?"

MERIT AWARD: Escape Velocity
Producer: Scott Ligon
Director: Scott Ligon
Contact: Scott Ligon: [email protected]
This quirky, animated autobiographical portrait gives viewers an inside-looking-out taste of life with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).Fast-paced, thoughtful, and frequently hilarious.

MERIT AWARD: Nectar OC
Producer: Abigail Davies
Director: Liz Crow
Contact: Liz Crow: [email protected]
With glorious cinematography and exquisite attention to detail, established British director Liz Crow creates a cinematic jewel about love, choice and impossible possibilities. Set ostensibly in the summer of 1931 in industrial England, Nectar is a poignant coming-of-age tale about Walter, a deaf, champion swimmer who, at seventeen struggles to make his own life decisions against a tide of public expectations.

SPIRIT AWARD: Braindamadj'd...Take II
See "Excellence Award"

PAMELA K. WALKER AWARD: Equilibrium
Producer: Adrean Mangiardi
Director: Adrean Mangiardi
Contact: Adrean Mangiardi: [email protected]
A powerful and provocative artistic short that explores the chaos and cacophony of input that can result from moving from a nonhearing to hearing world because of adjustment to cochlear implants or hearing aids.

EMERGING ARTIST AWARD: The Third Parent
Producer: Christina Frenzel
Director: Christina Frenzel
Contact: Christina Frenzel: [email protected]
This is an honest and touching look at familial love and duty from the rare perspective of a sibling. The use of 16 mm film and slightly off-sync sound gives the work a raw, gritty home movie feel that heightens its intimacy and intensity.

For additional information on the films and producers, please contact us at [email protected].

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