Forum of Award-Winning Films

to reflect the creative practices of the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) membership more fully, this forum showcases a selection of films awarded honorable mentions and awards of merit at UFVA conferences in 2022 and 2023. The collection explores diverse themes, such as hope, identity, climate change, attentiveness, gender, freedom, dignity, curiosity, and wonder. Formally, the films exhibit a range of production and epistemological modes. In addition, the filmmakers assume many creative roles, including writer, producer, director, animator, cinematographer, and editor. By introducing each clip with an artist's statement, this forum seeks to illuminate the social and cultural issues, aesthetic influences, stylistic techniques, and production methods deployed to create these acclaimed films.Film clips discussed in this article are available here:https://files.press.uillinois.edu/journals/supplemental/jfv/Forum_Of_Award_Winning_Films/We were living in Damascus with our two small children when the Syrian Revolution broke out in March 2011. Suddenly, our life became synonymous with conflict—conflict that was playing out in the country but also in our marriage.We witnessed peaceful demonstrations with people chanting, “We want freedom; we want dignity,” but these desires soon turned into nightmares. The authorities fired on demonstrators, then arrested and tortured them. Death could strike anywhere, at any time. Like a poison, fear began to divide us. The violent government reactions soon caused one of us to leave the country with our children, while the other stayed.Thousands of miles, oceans, time zones, and a world separated us. Our only link became the creation of this film. Although apart, we had the need to testify, via cinema, to the dramas that were playing out and that are unfortunately still happening.It is during this period that The Translator takes place—a moment when all was possible, when Syrians believed, like with the other Arab Spring revolutions, that the moment of emancipation and democracy was within reach. But violence quickly took precedence over hope, and suspicion won minds over.The conflict degenerated, and the peaceful revolution turned into a brutal war. Our family members who remain in Syria have been arrested, kidnapped, and tortured, and our apartment was bombed. The Translator emerged from this context.The protagonist is Sammy, a Syrian translator who has been living in exile for eleven years in Australia. Sammy makes the choice, despite the risks, to return to his country to find his brother, who has been arrested by the Assad regime. Sammy represents us, or more precisely, a projection of the commitment that we wished we possessed and that pushes us to question our responsibility and culpability. Sammy has fled, uprooted himself, to live in freedom in Australia, but he cannot resolve that his country, Syria, and its people cannot share this freedom.However, audience awareness that this is Sammy's identity is not immediate. We allow him time in the narrative to advance in his investigation to find his brother, but little by little, we find him moving toward a deeper quest. This quest leads him to a gesture of final resistance, which might be meaningless when compared to the scale of the revolution, but which has the power to preserve his family's dignity.Along his journey, Sammy encounters characters who are utopians, others who are resigned, characters who prefer violence to pacifism, others who seek to mediate the actions of the regime, and those who prefer to join a jihadist movement. This variety of views and perceptions, which Sammy encounters at the same time as the viewer, allows the audience to further understand the complexities of what is happening in Syria.While there are important documentaries that show the violence, destruction, and death during the Syrian conflict, we wanted, through fiction, to dramatize the Syrian quest for dignity and freedom. Sometimes these values are incompatible, and their pursuit leads to unimaginable sacrifice. Ultimately, this film is meant to be a tribute to all those who believe they deserve to live in freedom with dignity.Women bleed. Get over it. Taboos surrounding women's health and sexuality are harmful to women. Women should be able to talk openly about hormones, bra straps, workplace parity, and body issues. Women should be able to enjoy sex without being slut-shamed. Women should be paid the same wages as their male counterparts. Women should have fair representation in the media and the ability to show a little armpit hair without having “F*** you, feminism” appear in the Instagram comments.Womanhood: The Series is an original anthology film series created by filmmakers across the nation. Each episode tells a story about a uniquely female or female-identifying experience such as menstruation, menopause, workplace disparity, pregnancy, sex, identity, and aging. The series gives us an opportunity to laugh at the challenges we face regularly. Our hope is that this project will contribute to more women's voices in the media, normalizing diverse women on screen, women behind the scenes of the film industry, and women in comedy in order to empower more to share their stories.The artistic excellence of this series has proven successful, with three completed episodes garnering eight awards and more than fifty international film festival acceptances (available to view on jessicamcgaugh.com). This track record demonstrates that content with female leads and women's stories are desired by audiences. We are seeking funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts to expand Womanhood: The Series into a second season, but with a twist.Womanhood: The Series—Season 2: Women in the Workplace will pair women in STEM fields with women filmmakers, targeting stories from disciplines in which women are underrepresented. Our approach, using comedy to highlight social injustices, bias, and misrepresentation, is a proven storytelling methodology that has real and positive impacts. The outcome will be six original short films to be screened at international film festivals and universities and designed to ignite discussion and action.My short videos Ad Meliora (2021) and Natura Artis Magistra (2022) involve hundreds of digital photographs of flowers and plants. Ad Meliora also includes abstract images of urban spaces, such as cracked sidewalks and flaking graffiti. I photograph these images in places such as botanical gardens, nature conservatories, parks, vacant lots, and backyards. Once I have all the photos I need, I assemble them on a nonlinear timeline one after another, creating an abstract, collage-like animation. When I am taking pictures of the flowers, I am careful to keep the capitulum centered in the frame. Therefore, when each frame is assembled one after the other on the timeline, the center of the flower provides a stable, central point among the kaleidoscopic motion.Each photo is layered on top of a different one and composited through a blending effect. For instance, garden roses may be combined with wild daisies, and dahlias with black-eyed Susans. These sequences are sped up, slowed down, and organized according to how well they flow together. The soundtrack for Ad Meliora consists of sounds found in nature—birds, frogs, insects, rain, and wind—along with noises from human civilization, such as trains. The sounds are manipulated and combined to create an abstract, collage-like score that complements the visual image. Natura Artis Magistra features an original musical score composed by Marty Brueggemann, who is a frequent collaborator.The salient formal elements of my work consist of shape, form, color, texture, rhythm, and sound. Stylistically, both Ad Meliora and Natura Artis Magistra are animated collages of thousands of different images. I am inspired by the aesthetic and cultural significance of both Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, which represent harmony and unity. I am inspired by the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Odilon Redon, as well as the abstract experimental films of Jennifer Reeves and Mary Ellen Butte and the beautifully detailed films of animator Evelyn Lambart. Aside from these artists, I am inspired by the fact that nature itself is creative. Life has adapted and thrived through evolution and processes of natural selection, yet we have cultivated plants and animals to suit our own purposes. Nature shapes itself, but we also have shaped nature in both harmonious and harmful ways. It is crucial for us to understand our interaction with and impact on the natural world, especially when facing climate change.I do not intend to convey one specific message, nor do I aim to make a singular theoretical or political argument. Instead, I hope to create an aesthetic and emotional experience for the viewer that evokes curiosity, optimism, and wonder. I also hope my work suggests resilience and the possibility of coexistence between humanity and the environment by providing a deep meditation on life, creativity, and nature.My films illuminate current issues from a fresh perspective by blurring the boundaries between observation and imagination, outer and inner world. My strategy is to lure viewers with seductive imagery while introducing tonal counterpoints that undercut the alluring images. The goal is to reclaim the power of attention, a faculty that is now deeply threatened. Attention allows us to question our preconceived notions, receive new input, and discover an inexhaustible source of beauty, mystery, and meaning in our lives. It leads to a stronger connection with the world we inhabit. Attention is the beginning of attentiveness.The language of science fascinates me. I strive to bring out the poetic dimensions of the scientific imaginary. To do that, I reframe scientific tropes through art-history traditions, especially the Romantic sublime.My film Supersymmetry is a requiem for the Arctic, and it unfolds through the dreamlike journey of a lost polar explorer into an inner and outer universe of ice. His vital functions declining, the man hallucinates that he is becoming one of the glaciers, which he calls “crystal beings.” The heroic stance gives way to wonder. A meditation on annihilation—both our individual demise and that of the crystal beings—Supersymmetry frames climate change within a deconstruction of Western conquest tropes. It highlights how environmental tragedy destroys not only a physical place of staggering beauty but also a tender psychic territory within us.This was the first time I had worked with two screens, and it was thrilling to discover the formal possibilities they offer. For instance, two screens can present innovative constructions of space (wraparound view, distant vs. close-up) and multiple points of view (omniscient vs. subjective, reality vs. imagination).The project also sparked my interest in depicting non-ordinary states of consciousness as a means to access new ways of seeing and to defamiliarize the familiar. I want to move viewers beyond the type of attention required to follow a dramatic plot toward a more contemplative, almost trancelike experience.My films have played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on PBS television, and internationally in Europe and South America. They have won the Silver Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Critics Prize at the Dakino International Film Festival, the Director's Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival, and the Merit Award at the University Film and Video Association Juried Competition. I have been awarded grants and fellowships from institutions that include the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Born and raised in Romania, I live in New York and teach at Vassar College.Amplifying Feedback Loop was inspired by my time living in Shishmaref, Alaska, and witnessing firsthand just how rapidly the climate was changing. Speaking with local peoples who had subsisted on the lands since time immemorial, I was stunned by how changes in patterns of life were impacting their ability to harvest and survive from the land. Instead, they now often relied on more costly flown-in foodstuffs, which many struggled to afford due to their remote location. Through mounting concern and a desire to contribute and understand more, I participated in a workshop offered through the University of Alaska Fairbanks and GLOBE/NASA Earth Signs. The workshop taught citizen science, how to measure the world around me, and it discussed the very real effects of climate change on our planet—namely, the imbalance of a human-caused amplifying feedback loop.Climate feedback loops are “processes that can either amplify or diminish the effects of climate forcings” (“Study of Earth”). Feedback loops are processes that make the impacts of key climate factors stronger or weaker. They start a cyclical chain reaction that repeats. There are two types of loops: positive and negative. Negative feedback is a process that causes a decrease in climate change or is an action used in efforts to stabilize the Earth's climate system. A positive feedback loop accelerates the response to the climate factor (such as carbon-based emissions). A positive feedback loop increases initial warming and amplifies it with each subsequent return through the looped system. We are currently living within a positive feedback loop that is contributing to climate change, with the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause.This animated film, though it cannot hope to be the solution, is intended to help viewers recognize that the main element in climate change is human action and inaction. Our collective action has caused a quickly expanding and multiplying heating of our planet through the use of fossil fuels. An overt lack of accountability of corporations, governmental bodies, and capitalistic tendencies seeking profit over health has punished the average individual, but none more so than the vulnerable and underprivileged, such as BIPOC communities. However, we are also the solution—and our actions to put pressure on administrators and elected officials and to take stands using our voices, down to the local level, can begin to create negative forcings, actions that could help our communities survive and live more harmoniously with the land not only by protecting the planet and its inhabitants but also by creating better human-led infrastructural change, as evidenced through the United Nations’ seventeen climate sustainability goals (“The 17 Goals”).This work is meant to share hope and act as a reminder that, for those who are ready to create change, it can be done only through collective community action.Manscaping is a documentary portrait of three queer men who are reimagining the traditional barbershop. Devan Shimoyama is a Black American artist whose barbershop painting series draws on Afrofuturism and drag to envision the Black barbershop as a more inclusive space. Jessie Anderson is a transgender Canadian barber and proprietor of Big Bro's Barbershop, where trans, gender-nonconforming, and queer customers know they will not have to “go back into the closet” to get a haircut. Richard Savvy, Australia's “naked barber,” is a fetish barber, porn actor, and former “Sydney Mr. Leather” who invites you to leave your shame and clothes at the door and add the transformative power of kink to your cut.I sought out and with the in over and through the production they became my I do not to for the Black and my own queer and with with creative and of documentary as a means of social change, make an to these as we reframe the world through a queer men and their communities of and a of and with help more as an cultural and space for and social new of and cultural identity that both and of as able to use and to in to of seeks to and formal that the and of Western These include the formal of the of or the of as a of violence and and the of story and narrative by as in the of and and the of also seek to two tropes often found in documentaries about queer and BIPOC and on the and of a and the and of such queer and BIPOC issues through such and them from communities and of that often and of beauty or with cultural their and and Richard ways we can through the of male in of social and freedom. 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