CineYouth 2026 Award Winners
Award winners from the 2026 CineYouth Festival.
Download the CineYouth 2026 Program BookAnimation Award
Our Pockets Are Full
Our Pockets Are Full features exceptional animation and direction that pulls at your heart strings in the most perfect ways. Its use of documentary style techniques in the personal interviews with family members beautifully captured how animation can seamlessly blend styles to make it its own unique medium. The filmmaker’s own reflections grounded the story to make the personal feel universal. From the strong technical elements to the intentional way it used animation to explore themes of family, time, and space, Our Pockets Are Full showcases how animation can be a vessel for the most moving stories.
Chicago Award
Folded Stories
The exquisitely crafted visual world unfolded layers of the delightful, deep, and heartfelt interconnected relationship between identity, memory, and fashion the artist celebrates in this film. It embodied risky, vulnerable storytelling with a tremendous sense of place: Chicago. This jury of Chicago filmmakers is honored to award the 2026 Chicago Award to Folded Stories directed by Sylvanna LeBlanc.
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Comedy Award
The Shoe Thief
We love how The Shoe Thief uses sharp comedic edge and the symbolism of gnarly shoes to explore tension and healing in a terse mother-daughter relationship. Driven by complex character development, symbolic writing and cinematography, and thoughtfully crafted production design, the pacing and wit of this film made it stand out as the Jury’s top choice for the Comedy Award.
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Documentary Award
La Esperanza
The jury was deeply moved by this equally beautiful and tragic tale of migration, belonging, and separation. With striking cinematography and a lyrical, deeply felt narration, Javier crafts an intimate and visually poetic work that captures the quiet, enduring cost of lives lived across borders. His film shows remarkable maturity in storytelling, seamlessly weaving the personal with the universal in a way that feels especially urgent today. Bravo Javier.
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Drama Award
Sunny Oaks
This tender and darkly comedic story about an aging mother and her world-weary son moved our jury with its succinct and emotional demonstration of growing old, and of finding yourself suddenly enmeshed in mundane patterns in ways that are unanticipated and even frightening. We were impressed by the filmmaker’s capacity to pack such a significant emotional punch through its contained narrative – two characters, one retirement community, and one gun on the wall. The story was tightly wound, well paced, cleverly edited – and, while familiar, kept us guessing until all expectations were subverted as the credits rolled.
Experimental Award
Songs of Gentle Night
Our jury was impressed by the filmmaker’s grasp of experimental form — namely, how they were able to construct a story that nearly transcends medium through its integration of still photography, found footage, and expressive, virtuosic capture of landscape. We were particularly stunned by the sound design; the interplay of light, shadow, and the natural world; and the filmmaker’s ability to communicate a sprawling, intergenerational narrative exclusively through non-linear image and sound.
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International Award
The Mine
With a respectful nod to Chinese cultural history, this film is intensely visual and deeply moving with a strong heart. Its dramatic, artful integration of tension, and amazing acting by a diverse range of actors from young to village elders made it a compelling work that we’re honored to award the International Award.
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Rising Star Award
Bootstrapping for the Boobied
Bootstrapping for the Boobied is an innovative, provocative, and unique film that captures the essence of being a burnt out, queer, art student under the weight of late-stage capitalism. It’s a film that sticks with you. Visually, it’s one of a kind. Even the smallest details, shapes, and color choices speak to a larger artistic vision that’s not only gorgeous and exhilarating, but intellectually stimulating and critically motivated. The CineYouth Programming team was truly blown away by this film. We are thrilled to present filmmaker Stella Chen with the Rising Star Award, recognizing her as a filmmaker with immense potential.
The Rising Star Award is presented by
