WV Mountaineer Short Film Fest

Great end of semester show by Digital Art & Animation students at @monartscenter last night. cool VR and interactive works, some hard hitting performances and amazing experimental videos and animations up on the screen - including a couple of impressive senior project works. Thanks Jason Zeh @jasonzeh for planning and pulling this together! @wvmsff @wvustudentfilmfest @wvuartdesign

ALT-CTRL Wed. April 29th 7-9pm At the Mon Arts Center The artists in WVU Digital Art and Animation courses this semester have been working hard curating a live event that will take place at the MAC this Wednesday. This exhibition will include screenings of film and video art from students including senior projects, and graduate work. It also features several media performance pieces, interactive video installation, and virtual reality experiences. Please join us and experience exciting new media works.

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Time to check out this year's top young filmmaker, or in this case filmmaker-s, Isaiah Supadi and Oscar Smith of Australia, whose film Bunny won this year’s Best Young Filmmaker award. This completely engrossing and brilliantly edited suspense film had us literally on the edge of our seats. We were truly amazed that two high school students could create such a quality work as this. We note however that they have a pretty good mentor! @jayjayaustralia The Bunny was so good that we decided to screen it two times during the festival! Congratulations Oscar and Isaiah on a remarkable film!! 🏆🏆 We can only imagine what comes next for you guys! @isaiah.supadi Isaiah Supadi and Oscar Smith are teenage, aspiring West Australian directors, writers, and editors who specialise in psychological thrillers, action-driven crime, mystery, and extreme horror. They have collaborated on multiple projects across genres they are equally passionate about, including action, mystery, psychological thrillers, and horror. Together, they have co-written and directed several short films. About their film Bunny they write, “Five years after his sister vanished on Easter night, sixteen-year-old Johnny lives in a town still scarred by her disappearance. When chocolate eggs begin appearing again and whispers of the Easter Bunny resurface, Johnny is forced to confront a truth no one wants to believe. As grief, guilt, and childhood myth collide, The Bunny descends into a chilling exploration of the unknown, innocence, and the cost of keeping ancient horrors alive.” We should point out that the competition in this category was very steep. We received many submissions from young film makers from all around the world this year. We note some incredible works from the International School of Kuala Lumpur @iskl.hollywoodbound , including Mephisto, another brilliant suspense film by 16-year-old Abhigyan Ravichandran and the thoughtful and moving film Fallen by 15-year-old Angela Yan. Shout out also to regional filmmaker Peyton Rhian Fitz @p_rfitz of Maryland whose incredible film The Red Thread won an Honorable Mention in this category. Amazing work all of you - keep it up!!!

This year's Best Student Animation award went to Service Bus by Norwegian animation student Elmer Lødemel and his talented team of collaborators as part of their 2025 graduation project for the Animation Workshop @animationworkshop in Denmark. A hilarious, action-packed story about crazy bus ride and an even crazier bus driver. We agree with the overall sentiment though – anything for a good cup of coffee! ☕☕ @servicebus_shortfilm In his description of the project Elmer writes, “We all know the service button on airplanes—but what about the ones on buses? When a bored traveler stumbles upon one, his curiosity gets the better of him. But with only the bus driver on duty, pressing it might lead to unexpected consequences.” Elmer “strives to spread joy through telling comedic stories along with well composed images.” Congrats Elmer and team! 🏆 #studentfilm #studentanimation #coffee #crazybus

Still a few more awards we need to recognize here, saving the best for last - the student works of course!!! As a university affiliated festival, we cherish this part of our event! This year's Best Experimental Student Award went to Mahsa Talebiani @lylilunaa for her film Fumble. Mahsa is a student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. We were absolutely mesmerized by Fumble’s surrealist depictions and stunning visual explorations. We were also really intrigued by its cryptic uses of metaphor and symbolism, which felt as dreamlike as they did mundane in their references to contemporary culture. As Masha puts it, “Fumble is a series of lighthearted performative vignettes that explore the duality of immigrant and queer life, the longing to return to the familiar geographic, cultural, and bodily coordinates of the past, alongside an equally compelling desire to assimilate into a new culture and identity. It depicts both the attempts and failures to fit in and explores the felt incongruities of this experience in a hybrid form. Congratulations Masha on a truly captivating work! 🏆 Mahsa is an experimental filmmaker exploring the intersections of queerness and diaspora experience. Their work delves into the sensory explorations within intercultural cinema, often showcasing their own body to manifest an embodied vulnerability. Through performance, video art, and sculptural space, they challenge traditional narrative film structures and hierarchical productions. #wvmsff #videoart #surrealistfilm #performanceart

We created two new awards this year: The Body and Soul Award, and the Earth and Sky Award. (Both with modest cash prizes like our other main category awards.) This award recognizes works that most compellingly and artistically remind us of our deep connections to the earth and the surrounding environment, revealing or expressing the many ways in which that relationship creates meaning. They may also awaken us to factors that threaten to break those ties or change them irrevocably. The 2026 Earth and Sky Award went to Andrés Dávila’s “En su Sombra Fértil” (In its fertile shade) an intimate portrait of Mercedes Cuatindioy and the plot of land she cultivates in the Sibundoy Valley of Colombia - her “chagra” - preserving indigenous Inga knowledge and practices about its plants, seeds, trees and animals, and resisting calls to more profitable monoculture farming practices. Dávila @andresdavilaa holds a PhD degree in Film and Audiovisual Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University - Paris 3. His artistic practice explores the relationship between ethnography and experimental cinema. His short documentary film Sour Lake (2019) has been screened at international film festivals and contemporary art venues, and in 2021 he received the Jury Prize (Prix Psyché) at the French festival Cinemabrut.

The Landscape Convergences program consisted of 10 diverse works ranging from short surrealistic fictions to experimental documentary works. They all shared a strong emphasis on landscape. These views of the surrounding environment however did not function as mere background imagery. In some works they seemed to become catalysts of sorts, activating the story. In others they were deeply embedded and intertwined with the historical accounts portrayed. Still in others, as in the films “amphibolos lithos” from Ukraine and “Sulfur” from Portugal, the landscapes even seemed to acquire a symbolic presence, becoming almost like characters in the story. In each, rather than simple locations, the landscape seemed more like a connecting point, where humans and animals come together in a specific and necessary place where meaning unfolds. Its importance in these works also seemed to signal a kind of need or desire to get back to a sense of being more grounded in the world, or to preserve what might be lost. The works in the Landscape Convergences program were so compelling they inspired a new award this year, the Earth and Sky Award, which was given to the film "En su Sombra Fértil" by Andrés Dávila, an intimate glimpse into the world of an elderly farmer named Mercedes Cuatindioy living in the Sibundoy Valley of Colombia. He writes, “Cuatindioy cultivates her chagra as an act of resistance and memory. Through the way she plants, cares for, and interacts with her plants, she transmits indigenous knowledge that is threatened by oblivion and monoculture. Congratulations Andrés on a powerful and moving film! 🏆 @andresdavilaa Landscape Convergences: Alpine Tundra by Kathleen Rugh @kathyrugh Sulfur by Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes @karenakerman Hurricane Season by Michelle Trujillo @pionerafilmvideo Fjord Time by Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson and Carleen Maur @photo.johnson @c.arl_e In its fertile shade by Andrés Dávila @andresdavilaa WHY-EEELA by Ian Gibbins @iangibbins52 amphibolos lithos by Valery Grysha @valerygrysha Katelin Describes a Crisis by Stephen Wardell @_stephenwardell Las Animas by Matt Feldman @matt__feldman Linija Među Nama by Milena Jovićević

This year, in lieu of a “Best of Show” award, we created two new Special awards - kind of spontaneously: The Body and Soul Award, and the Earth and Sky Award. These were inspired by: 1) There were way too many great works to have just one top award. 2) The submissions themselves revealed some truly interesting patterns, and we had to dig deeper. This always happens to a degree; and it’s the thing that animates the programing process. This year however there were two super salient and unmistakable areas of focus in many of the works we selected that demanded special acknowledgement. One placed emphasis on health and healing, on integrating body and mind - and soul? Yes. In a way, nothing new really. But in times of true crisis, we return to fundamental questions and values. What does it mean to be fully human? What does it mean to be whole, and well, and right? These topics were explored in many of the works we selected this year, but none more expressly and poetically than in Milwaukee based filmmaker Gabi Rudin’s work All of This Must Be Paid For, which is the first winner of the Body and Soul Award 🏆. Of this work she writes “The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.” Congratulations Gabi on a thoughtful and connecting work! And for helping to remind us of what we are, and what matters most when things break down. Gabi Rudin @gabi.rudin is a teaching artist and filmmaker living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is interested in the ways people endure embodiment in a sociopolitical system.

Looking back on some of the outstanding works from this year’s edition. We’re feeling fortunate to have the opportunity to experience deep, independent and authentic expressions in a media environment increasingly corporate, monolithic and impersonal. 🙏 The program “Integrating was a bulwark against this tendency. 10 highly original works which, while very different in ways, all seemed to converge on the human need to rectify what is wrong, in a range of circumstances. The need to reframe, to reconcile, to synthesize or to become whole. Dollhouse Elephant by Jenny Jokela @jokelajenny beyond the supernova‍ by Masha Kochanenkova @m.kay.make You Do Not Exist by Dwayne LeBlanc @madehaste All of This Must Be Paid for by Gabi Rudin @gabi.rudin The Box by Caroline Rumley @mediapoesie Noli me tangere‍ by Mahda Purmehdi @mahda.purmehdi Fačuk‍ by Maida Srabovic @mmmaida.hit Fumble by Mahsa Talebiani @lylilunaa giiwe πρό bizhiw / bizhiw πρό giiwe by mystery byrd @mysteryy.vsa Hiding Places by Magdalena Bermudez

The 2026 Best Documentary award went to the film On Camera by Pittsburgh filmmaker Jackie Mishol @misholimpossible . On Camera was the last film we showed this year and was included in the final screening: a selection of works centered on individuals who, in one way or another, stepped up or stepped into their roles to find a sense of purpose in the world and in their communities. On Camera is a heartfelt telling of Jackie’s efforts to honor her deceased mother, stepping into her new role as a cinematographer in order to do so - and learning from her mom in the process. Congratulations Jackie on an inspiring and poignant look into your shared world!! 🏆🎬 “Using what her mother has left behind, a camera-woman’s director daughter teaches herself cinematography across the country; it’s up to her to piece their story together, in this experimental documentary that explores identity, purpose, legacy, women in film, and the connection of an artist to their maternal muse.” #wvmsff #documentary #experimentaldocumentary #bestdocumentary

This year's Best Narrative award went to Papa by Florias Welch Gallay of Switzerland @floriaswelchgallay . Papa is a beautiful and moving short story about a dying woman and her father reaching back and forward through time for help. We loved how this short film played with memory and time, merging past, future and the present through the prism of deep love. Gorgeous!!! The world needs more of this for sure. Congrats on a great short film Florias! “An elderly woman, on the threshold of death, prepares to reunite with her father. We accompany her in this reunion through a poetic and spiritual film.” Check out more of his work: 🎥 www.fauve.co @fauvestudios