(RED BANK, NJ) -- The 2021 Indie Street Film Festival took place September 8-12 with in-person screenings. The festival has announced its selections for award-winning films. Films are available now through September 19 with virtual screenings available for purchase. This year's documentary jurors included Brandon Harrison, Carolyn Hepburn, and Zeshawn Ali. Narrative jurors included Bill Curran, Joseph Hernandez, and Morgan Ingari.
DOCUMENTARY JURY AWARD WINNERS
BEST FEATURE: Queens Of Pain directed by Cassie Hay & Amy Winston. Three women — Suzy Hotrod, Evilicious, and Captain Smack Sparrow — struggle to balance life in New York City with the dedication needed to maintain their spots on the world’s best roller derby team.
BEST SHORT: Ain't No Time For Women directed by Sarra El Abed. Tunis, November 2019. A group of women is gathered at Saïda’s, the hairdresser, on the eve of the presidential election. The salon is transformed into a town square, mirroring the internal turmoil of the country. In this female sanctuary, we get an intimate look at the county’s teenage democracy.
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE: Ten Leaves Dilated directed by Kate Hinshaw. Ten Leaves Dilated is a documentary that uses the make-believe world crafted by Cabbage Patch Kids to examine discourses surrounding childbirth and motherhood in the American South.
NARRATIVE JURY AWARD WINNERS
BEST FEATURE: Ninjababy directed by Yngvild Sve Flikke | Written by Johan Fasting, Yngvild Sve, FlikkeInga Sætre. Astronaut, forest-keeper, cartoonist. Young Rakel has a whole lot of other plans than becoming a mother. She would rather party, get drunk or stoned instead of sitting hours on the toilet. But she can't ignore it. Is it her or the baby?
BEST SHORT: Bruiser directed by Miles Warren | Written by Miles Warren, Ben Medina. After his father gets into a fight at a bowling alley, Darious begins to investigate the limitations of his own manhood
BEST ANIMATED: In The Shadow Of The Pines directed & Written by Anne Koizumi. An animated short documentary about a difficult father-daughter relationship. Drawing on childhood memories, Anne Koizumi, the filmmaker, explores her upbringing with her Japanese immigrant dad, who was also the janitor at the elementary school she attended. The film explores the idea of shame and how it can shape and define us while also concealing who we can truly become.
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE (PERFORMANCE): Play It Safe - Jonathan Ajayi directed & Written by Mitch Kalisa. Coaxed into playing a racial typecast in a fellow student’s play, Black drama student Jonathan is faced with all too familiar decision: to challenge prejudice, or play it safe.
2021 Documentary Jurors
Brandon Harrison is a producer, writer and programmer. He is a Feature Documentary Programmer at the Brooklyn Film Festival, served on the review committee for IFP and Tribeca's Pilot Season and has produced multimedia content for a variety of media outlets including Players’ Tribune, Vanity Fair and SLAM magazine. Brandon is a graduate of Morehouse College and received his M.A. in Cinema from UCLA. He loves a good story.
Carolyn Hepburn is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer. She most recently produced Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground (Cannes Film Festival) and Nanfu Wang’s In The Same Breath (Sundance Film Festival). Hepburn executive produced Socks on Fire (2020 Tribeca Grand Jury Prize); Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent and produced Gotham and IDA Award winner A Thousand Cuts. She co-produced Life, Animated, nominated for the 2017 Academy Award. Other recent projects include: One Child Nation; Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn; Charm City; Ringside; Love, Gilda; Take Your Pills; Weiner; 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets; Art and Craft and Showtime series Murder in the Bayou.
Zeshawn Ali is a documentary filmmaker and director originally from Ohio and is a graduate of Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. His debut feature film, TWO GODS was selected in festivals across the US and recently named a New York Times Critic pick and premiered nationally on PBS on "Independent Lens". He is a member of Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and Meerkat Media. He is currently based in New York.
2021 Narrative Jurors
Bill Curran has held senior leadership and programming positions at the Nantucket Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, The Gotham Film & Media Institute (formerly IFP), and The Paley Center for Media. In 2020, he produced “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration”, a virtual concert for ASTEP (Artists Striving To End Poverty), made and streamed in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The concert has been viewed over 4 million times online around the globe, and was cited on "Best of 2020” lists in the New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post, among others.
Joseph Hernandez is a SAG-AFTRA actor and film festival programmer based in North Bergen, New Jersey. He currently serves as Senior Programmer of the North Bend Film Festival, a destination fest taking place in the town of Twin Peaks, and programmer with the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, a premiere NYC event every October. Joseph also helped launch Nightstream, a virtual megafest designed to keep the American genre festival circuit alive while theatres were closed in 2020. This year, he co-founded the Reel Love Film Festival, a fest wholly dedicated to highlighting the best new love stories in film.
Morgan Ingari is a queer Brooklyn-based filmmaker. She graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2013, and went on to direct branded content for companies like MasterCard, Nine West, Bordeaux, and Bon Appetit. Her first feature film, 2021's "Milkwater" starring Molly Bernard (Younger), won multiple awards at festivals like the Bushwick Film Festival, Indie Street Film Festival, and Brooklyn Film Festival. It is now available to view on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. She has worked myriad other jobs (with debatable degrees of skill) outside of filmmaking, including camp counseling, satire writing, and healthcare education.
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