We asked our Audience Awards community to show us their shorts dedicated to spreading enlightened ideas that push humanity forward. Here are the top three jury selected winning films from our AudFest Faith and Spirituality Shorts Film Festival.
Our First place winning film is Deana’s Story: Dementia and the Middle Class by Joe Digital, Inc. Joe Digital, Inc. is currently working toward their goal of building the world’s largest collection of Alzheimer’s stories on video, a collection of films they are calling MyAlzheimers Story Project. To date, they’ve created 500+ videos, featuring families, caregivers, doctors, and advocates. Zach Jordan of Joe Digital, Inc. filled is on the project and explained,
Deana’s Story: Dementia and the Middle Class is one of our most recent stories and we’re very proud to share and give Deana’s family a voice. Most importantly, the more videos we create, the more effectively we are able to shine a light on the great work being done by organizations like the Deana Foundation, so other families get support. This is an ongoing project and we look forward to sharing many more stories.
Deana was diagnosed with Dementia at age 50. As her family struggled to deal with the emotional and financial impact of caregiving, Deana’s daughter Cassandra created a foundation to help middle-class families affected by Dementia.
Our second place winning film, Mohamed The First Name by Zairi Malika began the festival circuit under a year ago and has already managed to screen at over 100 festivals worldwide.
Mohamed is the most popular name in the world but it is not easy to carry it in West. Mohamed, a boy of 10 years old tells why he doesn’t like his first name. His parents remind him the origin of this first name. The first-name of the Prophet of Islam which spread a message of love and peace around the world.
In third place is Automatic Fitness, created by Alejandra Tomei & Alberto Couceiro of Animas Film. Automatic Fitness is a labyrinthic poetry on the human automatism. A reflection about our daily relationship with money and time. It’s an animated tragicomedy which plays with the concept of an all-permeating acceleration. It is about the stranglehold of everyday madness and the automatisms, in which we are forced to live, work, breathe, think and exist. It’s a parody of this already aged so-called “modern way of life.”
When asked about the creation of Automatic Fitness, Tomei said,
It’s certainly not easy to make a film like this. It’s taken me 7 Years of my life. It was hard to keep going. But here I’m planning a new one. That’s life.
A huge thanks to our community of creatives and filmmakers who submitted, and hearty congratulations to all the winners! We look forward to seeing the top three films premiere at AudFest 2018! To stay up-to-date on our festival winners, visit: https://audnews.com/contests/winners