Slamdance winners announced

Awards for Welcome To Pine Hill, Bindlestiffs and No Ashes No Phoenix

by Robert Munro

Last night the 18th annual Slamdance festival concluded by presenting Audience and Grand Jury awards to the best narrative and documentary films showcased at this year's event.

The Audience Awards went to Getting Up, by Caskey Ebeling, for best documentary and Bindlestiffs, by Andrew Edison, for best feature narrative.

In the Grand Jury Awards, winners came in the form of Keith Miller's Welcome To Pine Hill, which received the Grand Jury Sparky Award for Feature Narrative, and Axel Ranisc's Heavy Girls which won the Special Jury Award for Bold Originality.

In the Documentary category of the Grand Jury Awards, No Ashes, No Phoenix by Jens Pfeifer won the Feature award, while The Professional by Skylar Neilsen was this year's best short doc.

Peter Baxter, Co-Founder and President of Slamdance said: “This year's narrative and documentary competitions are stronger than ever, and these filmmakers represent the vanguard of true independent filmmaking."

In the Grand Jury Awards for Short Film the winners were:

Grand Jury Sparky Award for Animation: Venus by Tor Fruergaard.

Grand Jury Sparky Award for Short Film: I Am John Wayne by Christina Choe.

Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short: Solipsist by Andrew Huang.

And

Honorable Mention for Best Ensemble: I'm Coming Over by Sam Hande.

The Slamdance festival runs concurrent with this year's Sundance festival, and only accepts films for competition that are produced by first-time filmmakers working with production budgets of less than $1 million.

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