Congratulations to our Award Winners!
Congrats to Massive Monkees: The Beacon Director Shannon Gee and NƯỚC Director Quyen Nguyen-Le for winning the Director’s Choice Award and Cinemetropolis Best Short Film Award respectively. (Not pictured: TYRUS Director Pamela Tom)
Director’s Choice Award
MASSIVE MONKEES: THE BEACON, Shannon Gee
The Massive Monkees Crew started in the mid-90s as a group of kids bonding around a love of hip-hop and dance at a local rec center. After winning world championships and achieving many other accolades in the break dance community, the crew now runs their own studio, The Beacon, in the heart of Seattle, where they teach, mentor, and inspire people of all ages.
Cinemetropolis Best Short Film Award
NƯỚC, Quyên Nguyen-Le
A Vietnamese American teen attempts to piece together and understand their mother’s experience as a Vietnam War refugee. The journey pulls us into a fantastical series of iconic historical photographs and images, ultimately highlighting the complexity of fully understanding another’s experiences — and opens up possibilities for building relationships based on simply being present.
Audience Choice Award
TYRUS, Pamela Tom
Tyrus is Pamela Tom’s tour-de-force documentary about 105-year old Guangzhou-born, L.A.-based visual artist, Tyrus Wong, and his breathtaking scope of work across multiple artistic mediums and his personal and professional journey navigating racial bigotry in 20th century America. Seventeen years in the making, Tom’s film makes meticulous use of Tyrus Wong’s exquisite art, archival footage, illuminating interviews and commentary from Wong himself to document how his unique style, melding Chinese calligraphic and landscape influences with contemporary Western art, helped the Disney animated film, Bambi (1942) specifically, and early Hollywood in general establish their signature visual styles. TYRUS, the film, makes a critical contribution to the documentary tradition and to American society in correcting a historical wrong by spotlighting this seminal but heretofore under-credited figure.
