FRENCH INTERNATIONAL MODERN FILM AND SCRIPT FESTIVAL
Selection of the season
September - November 2023
third chapter of the trilogy on the life of the Virgin Mary taken from the writings of Blessed A.K. Emmerick
Fabio Corsaro
Best Web-Series
This is a series about life in North Baltimore. Multiple plots run through the series as we follow two families and their neighbors on or near Rosemary Street.
About two families, a black family, and a white family that raise their children a few houses away from each other over a 40 year span of time. About Life in North Baltimore, amongst the painted lady Rowhouses.
Elena Moscatt, Johnny Alonso
In 7 categories
Best Detective
After a brutal car accident a Detective looks over the evidence of a nearly unsolvable case.
Zane Hampton
Best Educational Film
We are the Wolf Nation, dwellers of the Northern Hemisphere, harbingers of the Spirit of the WILD. We are returning to take our place with you awake and aware and conscious humans at the dance of life.
Elke Duerr
Best Educational Film
On the Maguindanaon indigenous two-stringed lute kudyapiq and its relationships to social life and other music instruments.
Jose Semblante Buenconsejo
The Flying Granddaughter
Best Experimental Film
How the passion for earth globes took a girl from the grandfather lab's to the skies.
Marcus Veras
Best Experimental Film
Yellow Alienation No.1 is a film from Alienation Project, where the main character is the Alien Artificial Intelligence. The Alien AI is a synthetic hybrid character. It constantly transforms, morphs, defragments, shape-shifts. Their identity is fluid. They live in a situation of no borders and no frontiers. The Alien AI is neither alien nor artificial intelligence or creature. But all of them and none of them at the same time.
Christopher Angus
Best Experimental Film
“Dissolve” is a short meditation on the transience of sensory awareness pointing to that which is unchanging, immaterial, outside of time. It reaches for an equivalence between immediate sensation and metaphor. Ultimately, this work aims to be experienced more fully through the body than the mind. Moving at a breath-like pulse, modulating its light and atmosphere, repeating, varying, and elaborating both its visual and aural themes; “Dissolve” arrives at a dynamic stillness.
David B Moss
Best Experimental Film
Best Symbolic Film
Memories of the life of a man are told by his surviving 97 year old wife. Jose de Jesus' life is the catalyst into the exploration of memory and the transference of memory. The piece engages the memories of this man’s surviving wife as she retells moments lived in this life past through an etherial recreation of space, time, and movement.
Lesley Elizondo
Evocation
Best Horror
Best Experimental Film
A charismatic cult leader hires two thieves, Vansen and Clara, to break into a house in order to find lost documents. They soon discover that they are part of the cult leader's elaborate, manipulative game aiming to break Vansen's and Clara’s spirits.
Timothy N. Navarro, Justin Heinz
Best Fantasy
Odin has dispatched his knights (led by ELVIND) to eradicate the Forest Elves - The Huldra. MAIKEN and her sisters (THYRA & LISBET) are the last. MAIKEN & THYRA have conflicting plans for survival. Can the siblings work together and survive the last Odin hunt? FANTASY DRAMA SHORT
Howard Perry
A Dancer's Mask
Best Young Screenwriter (under 30y)
A newly adult daughter must win a national pole dancing competition's prize money to save her family from her mother's mental illness tearing it apart.
Mary Madaline Roe
Wise Old Owl
Best Feature Script
Best Male Screenwriter
Best Horror Screenplay
A middle-aged man is living in seclusion following a sad and failed life. He begins experiencing strange and horrifying occurrences; all of which are related to the choices of his life...
Jacob Louis Hayek
Sons of Distant Fathers
Best War Film
Set in 1950, a naive African American teen longs to join the Army. There, he confronts an enemy far greater than he ever imagined.
Debra J. Gipson
Best Feature Script
“MOTHER.” is the true story of a teenage girl, Norah, who lives in an abusive home with her mother, father, and sister. Norah's mother, Molly, is extremely abusive, both emotionally and physically. Though Norah has grown up in this tumultuous environment her entire life, at this stage in her life she is becoming increasingly ill under the stress caused by this relationship with her mother.
Brandi Haugen
Best Feature Script
In their intent to take Earth, Aliens sterilize the entire human race planning to wait them out; humans retaliate trying to outgun and outsmart them, but the end result won't be quite the expected one.
Carmen Silva
Six More Miles
Best Female Screenwriter
On a humid Ohio summer night, Deirdre Brooks has climbed through the tiny bathroom window of her grandmother’s house and acquired a giant bruise in the process. She often climbed through the window as a rowdy teenager. But now Deirdre is in her thirties, she has a key to the front door, and her grandmother is dead. She has no recollection as to why she made the decision to break in....
Diamond Keener
Chat Room
Best Female Screenwriter
Emma makes a living by posing as Bambi96 on an erotic chat. During the various conversations, Emma imagines meeting her interlocutors. Every person met in chat hides a huge pain that cannot be shared in real life.
Sabrina Monno
Best LGBTQ+ Film
MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE is a short, quirky, fully animated documentary about gender and family, as seen through children’s eyes. Driven completely by audio interviews of kids ages 5-10, the film uses these sound bytes combined with clip-art and mixed media to explore how children are able to experience a world outside of the traditional gender binary.
Sally Rubin
Best LGBTQ+ Film
Sprung from and ancient grudge, a pair of star crossed lovers fall for each other, only to be torn apart all too quickly.
Lesley Elizondo
Best Music Video
In the wake of their mother's tragic death from Covid-19, two estranged brothers embark on a transformative journey of reconciliation, drawing strength from the art of Karate and the profound wisdom of Bruce Lee.
Michael Sloman
Fugium II (Passage)
Best No-Dialogue Film
'Fugium II', is a 17 min., non-dialogue, experimental work in four parts that relates to ‘Fugium I’ in content and structure but extends the concept of seeking the sense of 'paradise', safety or retreat by walking a N/S line through a mountain terrain.
Malcolm Barrett
Best Music Video
Nominated for Best Song at the Paris Film Festival, Cool Christmas is included an award-winning soundtrack for Christmas Freak the movie, a movie about a 43-year old manboy who celebrates Christmas everyday embodying the giving and compassionate spirit of the holiday in hopes that his father will come back.
Sean Brown
Best Music Video
Only Eden is a pastoral, art music film, which was shot with the original 16mm Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera near my videographers off grid ranch in Arizona. It depicts two solitary characters (played by Plamondon) wandering in the wild; both of whom appear to be searching for something, but what that something is, is left up to the viewer to divine.
Andrea Jean Plamondon
Best No-Dialogue Film
The Drug Force Special Operations Team rescues a prisoner from a Russian torture chamber.
Lawrence Hussey
Best Original Score
Filmed under almost impossible conditions on Lake Michigan: temperature below freezing, winds >50 kts using a Canon DSLR with an unstabilized 400 mm lens. To accomplish this I placed the tripod and camera within an inch of the wall of a concrete building and found the optimum spot for viewing without any wind shake!
Timothy T Wenzel
Best Romance
In one location, a playwright locks herself in her apartment with her long time best friend as a “gofer” while she writes a production for Broadway. This friend, an accomplished artist and makeshift performer for the budding scenes, is madly in love with her and doesn’t know how to tell her.
Zane Hampton
Best Sci-fi Screenplay
A draft resister flees the US to Iceland tempted by absolute power and destiny of the world for either good or evil while encountering an advanced civilization living in the center of the Earth.
Colin K. Stewart
Rap Verse
Best Sci-fi Screenplay
Michael Green loves hip hop… but loathes what it’s become. The introvert rapper, slash spiteful blogger, has grandiose plans of returning the genre to real artistic purpose. Unfortunately he’s failing miserably, which also summarizes his life in general. Mike’s daily woes fade when a future version of himself appears with a quantum microphone, and a desperate plea to save hip hop from a hostile A.I. takeover. He’ll need to lose himself in the moment and risk it all to confront neighborhood thugs, family emergencies, ruthless record moguls and unthinkable time travel if he’s going to have a savior’s chance.
Rickey Teems II
Best Feature Documentary
This is the life story of a Japanese karate master and immigrant to Australia that will appeal to a broad audience and is a very Australian story in many ways.
Kayoshin Kayo survived the WW2 bombings of Japan, living through very tough conditions. He was taught by one of the 4 great masters of karate Kenwa Mabuni, and then developed karate schools all through Japan before coming to Australia for the first time in 1971. He was hugely influential in the establishment of karate here and the teaching of important philosophies and life skills to hundreds of people. He was also the owner of the first noodle restaurant in Australia!
Tom Pettitt
Best Feature Documentary
For many villagers of Stromboli, the volcano is both its Soul, and at the same time, a monster. And for some of them, the view of the volcano, was the last of their lives. During the great eruptions of 1930… Maria lost her grandfather. For many years, Maria has hoped that Grandpa is still alive. The fisherman, the philosopher, the cook… they're all dependent, bound to the mountain – a life in the unknown. This is Maria’s story… and a little bit of Stromboli's too.
Hanspeter Aliesch
Best Feature Documentary
"Disconnected" is a moving documentary that takes a deep dive into the world of suicide and its impact on those who have been affected by it. Through unscripted stories, the film offers a raw and intimate look at the struggles of those who have experienced suicide, either through the loss of a loved one or personal experience. The film shines a light on the taboo and stigma that often surrounds suicide, and highlights the importance of connection and support in preventing and coping with suicide. By sharing these real-life stories, .
Eric Gauss
Best Feature Documentary
Shadows in the box is the the exploration of the life and times of mercurial existentialist photographer, Thomas Clark.
As an artist, Thomas Clark started his career at eleven years old when his mother, Gloria Clark, offered him an eight millimeter movie camera as a birthday present.
Vaintino
Best Feature Documentary
Best Original Soundtrack
The fallout of a sibling's suicide on a family, the accelerated deaths of the parents and the investigation into the root cause. Brian was “the glue that held everything together,” recalls a family member in the first few minutes of “Masterjam.” To some it probably wasn’t a surprise, then, when things fell apart after he took his own life.
James Curry
Best Feature Documentary
nfluenced by the 1990 cult documentary Paris Is Burning, Victorian Queens explores the significance of Naarm's queer geographies and the drag queens who rule them.
Joseph Gardner, Andrew Cox
Best Feature Documentary
In the wild land of Shandong Province of China, there exists a number of special children, they are with serious disabilities, deserted, rejected, even their very existence denied since birth. But they are surprisingly happy, even thriving, to help each other out of love, because of parents they share: Daddy Steve and Mommy Xin Wei who strive to follow God's instruction to be salt and light, spread the love through their life.
Guang Li
Best Feature Documentary
This is a story of a woman who refused to be held back by societal norms. No one - man or woman influenced the post-World War 2 transportation industry more than Betty Skelton. Nicknamed "The First Lady of Firsts" she started as a three-time aerobatic champion who ended up behind the wheel of race cars for Dodge and Chevrolet.
Pam A Miller
Armenia(s), Time for Artists
Best Feature Documentary
What inspires artists in their creations?
To what extent is the history of their origins represented in their work?
What is transmitted to their children? This documentary aims to recount the creative power of artists of Armenian origin and to show the vitality of the transmission to their children, who have also become artists themselves. A story of legacy through artistic creation, with the testimonies of great artists.
Anitra Nelson