The Chris Landreth award juggernaut continued last weekend as his Oscar-winning short, Ryan, received the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The trailblazing pic, which also took top kudos at SIGGRAPH and Annecy in 2004, pays homage to Ryan Larkin, the pioneering animator who now panhandles for spare change in Montreal.
The festival’s award for Best Animated Short Film went to Gaelle Denis’ City Paradise, another Annecy favorite which centers on a Japanese girl’s eye-opening experiences in London. The inventive short utilizes a mix of live-action and animation techniques to tell its original story.
"Standing out among a selection of outstanding animated shorts including a bona fide classic, Ryan, City Paradise proved an exciting and imaginative mix of live action and animated filmmaking that realized a story-telling landscape that was both brilliantly strange and uniquely expressive," says the Shorts Competition Jury.
Other top fest favorites include Mark Banning’s Jellysmoke (Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature), Beth Bird’s Everyone Their Grand of Sand (Best Docuementary Feature), Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature), David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir! (Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature) and Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (Audience Award for Best International Feature).
A total of 266 films including 77 features representing more than 30 countries screened at the festival, which took place June 16-26. This year the fest received more than 3,700 submissions from filmmakers around the world, with the final selections representing several premieres. The Los Angeles Film Festival is produced by Film Independent (FIND). For more info, visit www.lafilmfest.com.
Leave a Reply