Festival Award Winners
Announcing the winning films of The 61st Chicago International Film Festival!
International Feature Film Competition
Selected by International Feature Film Competition jurors Melina León, Maura Delpero, Peter Kerekes, and Gabriel Mayers. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo: Best Film
It is rare to find a film that makes us thrilled, angry, yearning and lost at the same time. This film took us on an unexpected journey through the hallucinating world of the rave dancers in the desert of Morocco, with the specificity of a journalist, and with all the sensual power of a filmmaker. Sirât is a wild ride and explosive mastery of story elements, themes and emotions that mirror our crumbling world.
Silver Hugo: Jury Prize
We saw a theme in the festival of showing the world through children’s eyes. For the jury prize this year, we awarded a film that used a unique story structure. The Voice of Hind Rijab used audio as its protagonist and led the audience through a ride of emotion, gripped by a journey that is not our own.
Silver Hugo: Best Director
Mascha Schilinski
The Silver Hugo for Best Director goes to Mascha Schilinski for Sound of Falling for bringing to light, through a sensorial and immersive audiovisual language, the secrets, the unsaid, the traumas, and the phylogenetic lines that span generations from the depths of the protagonists’ and spectators’ consciousness. The direction, authentic and rigorous in every aspect, invites us into a private world that dialogues with the past, present, and future, creating a non-time constructed with great mastery and sensitivity.
Silver Hugo: Best Male Performance
Wagner Moura
The Silver Hugo for the Best Male Performance goes to Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent. Throughout his performance, he acts as a medium, allowing us to journey in his place as spectators. His presence is fresh, empathetic, often hypnotic, and never overacted. He has mastered the ability to personify a character in all its nuances and throughout the entire narrative arc.
Silver Hugo: Best Female Performance
Eszter Tompa
The Silver Hugo for Best Female Performance goes to Eszter Tompa for Kontinental ’25 for her subtle, incisive, never caricatural acting. Eszter Tompa has been capable of recounting a personal crisis while constantly opening up to universal reflections that summon all viewers. She manages to be human, fragile, imperfect, strong, everydayish, and perfectly coherent with the director’s irony. The spectator stays with her, in deep empathy, in her incessant search for an impossible, impeccable conduct.
Silver Hugo: Best Screenplay
Paolo Sorrentino
The Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay goes to Paolo Sorrentino for La Grazia, because the auteur made words become the flesh of the film. For the creation of wonderful characters and a story that feels spontaneous yet precise in its depiction of power, its moral dilemmas, and the absurd contradictions with the human condition.
Silver Hugo: Best Cinematography
Gergely Pálos
The Silver Hugo for Best Cinematography goes to Silent Friend for making visible the invisible connections between man and nature. Through its delicate visual language, the camera allows us to perceive the acting of both humans and plants.
Silver Hugo: Best Sound
The Silver Hugo for Best Sound goes to Sound of Falling for its ability to echo, in both its silences and thunders, the constant hum of secrets passed from one generation to the next in the apparent domestic quiet that both conceals and reveals. The soundtrack here is an important counterpoint to the visual impact, transporting the viewer into a subconscious state that connects them with their deepest emotions and life memories.
Special Mention
It is not easy to make a world plagued by war and a family reckoning with itself feel like a place that is both familiar and a place you’d like to return to. For its intimate cinematography, the warmth of detail to the composition, and depiction of community, family, and memory to what could be and still is, the jury would like to give a special mention to My Father’s Shadow, written and directed by Akinola Davies Jr.
New Directors Competition
Selected by New Directors Competition jurors Estrella Araiza, Marie Lamboeuf, and Vera Brunner-Sung. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo
In spite of very little dialogue, Short Summer kept us on the edge of our seats with its powerful mise-en-scène and poetic characterizations of people and place. We believe it speaks to the monumental importance of human connection in the bleakest times.
Silver Hugo
For an uncompromising vision of a dystopian landscape where nothing is as it seems, an unapologetic religious satire that boldly challenges preconceptions, the Silver Hugo goes to Karla Badillo’s Oca.
Special Mention
The jury would also like to acknowledge Louise Hémon, whose film The Girl in the Snow transported us into an extreme landscape, and created an unsettling atmosphere that kept us contemplating the nature of lust, education, and violence.
Documentary Competition
Selected by Documentary Competition jurors Theodora Barat, Lisa Cortés, and Abbie Perrault. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
We were deeply moved by the film’s original mode of storytelling. Unable to enter the besieged Gaza strip herself, Farsi forges a profoundly intimate connection through a year-long series of video calls with young Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. The visual simplicity of mobile phone exchanges, personal photos and Fatma’s own images of her city and people, creates a sense of closeness and immediacy, drawing us into the daily reality of life under siege. Farsi paints a complementary overview of what war does to people, as we witness Fatma Hassona’s mental state slowly declining: from joyful and hopeful to distracted and distraught. Through a lens of witness and empathy, the film becomes not only a portrait of resilience but also a living memorial to Fatma.
Silver Hugo
We were impressed by its exploration of a fragile eco-system through the story of a farmer who rescues and bonds with an injured white stork. The film’s seamless structure weaves together elements of folklore, intimate observation and environmental urgency. Kotevska approaches the subject with great sensitivity, crafting a dreamlike yet grounded work that speaks to the political relevance of capitalism’s impact on the pastoral way of life. Immersive and profoundly empathetic, The Tale of Silyan is a cinematic and poetic reflection on the interdependence between humans and nature.
OutLook Competition
Selected by OutLook Competition jurors haydée souffrant, Erik Gernand. and Paul Gonter. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Q-Hugo
Bouchra is a heartfelt and evocative film that mixes animation and docu-fiction; in a year that highlights genre, this film boldly defies it. Rather than a coming-out story, audiences are invited inward to explore how an artist externalizes the queerness of life into the tapestry of storytelling. Anthropomorphic characters lend their voices to make sense of a mother’s struggle to accept her child’s sexuality, while showing the beauty of chosen family filling in the gaps. Longtime collaborators Barki and Bennani peel back layered modes of storytelling to depict relationships brimming with humor and authenticity. It’s a narrative that creates a mirror for the things left unseen, in fact, Bouchra is a genre all its own.
Silver Q-Hugo
Pitting vengeful ghosts against a backdrop of a supernatural love story, A Useful Ghost charmingly plays with genre to question how history and myth can probe collective and socio-political grief. Exploring and broadening the definitions of queerness, the film possesses audiences to find the intersections of joy and how history can haunt us if we do not contend with the past. A Useful Ghost provides much levity to surprise viewers (and the jury) to reckon with the dustings of memory and loss to ultimately remind us that history, can in fact, repeat.
City & State Competition
Selected by City & State Competition jurors Laurie Little, Rachel Elizabeth Seed, and Linh Tran. Learn about our festival juries…
Chicago Award
The Chicago Award goes to One Golden Summer for its powerful, humane revisiting of an important Chicago story in danger of being forgotten: the Jackie Robinson West Little League team’s meteoric rise to the U.S. title and the devastating stripping of that achievement. Through intimate interviews with players, coaches, parents, journalists and opponents, director Kevin Shaw probes media bias, racial stereotypes, community pride and the ethical complexities of youth sports—showing how a moment meant to celebrate young athletes became a lasting stigma. The film is at once bittersweet, uplifting and, at times, devastating, honoring the team’s talent and resilience while forcing viewers to confront issues of racism and the complexities inherent in the framing of events and stories.
Live Action Short Film Competition
Selected by Live Action Short Film Competition jurors Donald Conley, Mehrnoosh Fetrat, and Hannah Schierbeek. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo
Emotionally impactful and technically impressive, Them That’s Not is a gratifying story ripe with moments of joy, a hint of mystery, and an earnest, heartwarming climactic scene. The jury especially liked the way the dialogue’s shift in volume and tone established the visceral experience of the main character — deeply rooting the audience inside Drea’s perspective. With elegant story structure, excellent sound design, and an assured ensemble cast, the film shines as a lived-in and relatable family drama.
Silver Hugo
The jury admired the way this film’s story unfolded to provide dramatic tension. Viewers are dropped into the aftermath of an unnamed personal conflict and must work out over the course of the runtime the stakes of the situation, a highwire act handled deftly by the actors whose tender performances provide the emotional impact of the film’s shattering final sequence. I’m Glad You’re Dead Now is at once personal and universal – an astounding exploration of grief and forgiveness.
Documentary Short Film Competition
Selected by Documentary Short Film Competition jurors Gwendolyn Infusino, cai thomas, and Sadia Uqaili. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo
Lanawaru is an unforgettable portrait of an indigenous community living along the Caquetá river in southeastern Colombia. With breathtaking cinematography and subtle sound design viewers are given a glimpse into a world visited by very few people. Every frame of the film feels intentional, capturing the river and forests of the Amazon with great attention to the light and sounds of the region. The central story of a young boy learning rituals from elders prompts universal questions about how spirituality can guide and limit our lives.
Silver Hugo
The Silver Hugo goes to Visiting Hours for its perfect edit and its ability to create a massive emotional impact with simple elements. The use of soft closeup and gentle soundscape focus viewers on the incredibly moving relationship between mother and son as they navigate the very common experience of memory loss. The jury also appreciated the thematically appropriate disregard for linear time used in the movie and found hope and joy in watching these characters seek humor and hold tight to each other in the face of a difficult disease.
Animated Short Film Competition
Selected by Animated Short Film Competition jurors Duarte Elvas, Grace Needlman, and Selina Trepp. Learn about our festival juries…
Gold Hugo
Autokar is a multi-layered and surrealist border story told in a winsome style that authentically renders a child’s first experience with traveling alone. The jury admired the magical character design, use of animals as complex character archetypes, and sophisticated framing and movement that all create the mysterious adult world the young protagonist navigates. A timely exploration of immigration this remarkable short animation remains playful, nuanced, and curious, offering something meaningful and delightful for viewers of all ages.
Silver Hugo
Ordinary Life earns the Silver Hugo for its stylish and exacting sense of design. Visceral and tactile, the piece quietly establishes a visual language out of small seemingly insignificant moments that through subtle transformation become impactful expressions of grief and loss. Using soft colors and the travel of light through monochromatic environments, this animation draws the viewer’s attention into sharp focus. Singular and unexpectedly emotional, Ordinary Life is a wondrous, aesthetic animated experience.
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