Festival Award Winners

This film carries the western to the far eastern edge of Europe and gives us one of the most unforgettable heroines in years, a woman whose quiet strength and independence become an act of resistance in a world ruled by men. We were deeply moved by a filmmaking rooted in observation, whose patient attention to every face and every encounter is what makes the adventure possible. For this grounded and luminous epic, we award The Dreamed Adventure by Valeska Grisebach the Gold Hugo for Best Film.

We have seen a truly unique film which speaks to the most hidden, most vulnerable parts of our soul. The director navigates these risky fields with the boldness and the grace of a sleepwalker. With wild imagination and with a tender, caring attention to her heroes she invites us to rarely explored territories of human grief where the solid walls of reality dissolve. We went through a cascade of different, sometimes contradictory emotions and were deeply thankful for the wild ride. The Jury Prize goes to Sandra Vollner for the film Everytime.

In her stunning debut feature, Marine Atlan gives us a many-layered portrait of lives at a turning point with La Gradiva. We were so impressed with her seamless depiction of a group departure from youth and innocence. For her shepherding this brilliant ensemble of actors and her compassionate dazzling depiction of a modern moment haunted by the past, we award Marine Atlan the Silver Hugo for Best Director.

Veska claims spaces that have traditionally been denied to her. Her gaze is an expression of her power: curious, irreverent, and unwilling to accept limits. Veska drew us into her way of seeing the world, and for that we are grateful. She steps into a past marked by injustice and violence, but refuses to let it define her. She remains free to desire, to say yes, to say no, and to make the story her own.

Watching Yana Radeva’s performance, we felt that she and Veska shared the same sharp intelligence and clarity of vision. It takes remarkable talent to convey strength through resistance and presence through listening. It is with great pleasure that we present the Silver Hugo for Best Performance to Yana Radeva for The Dreamed Adventure.

Lotte Shirin Keiling in Everytime gives a deeply soulful and finely observed portrayal of a young girl dealing with her grief stricken family and her own deeply conflicted experience of loss. She impressed us with a wisdom beyond her years about the human condition and her often wryly funny childlike reactions to the events swirling around her. For her poised and powerful performance, we award her the Silver Hugo for Best Supporting Performance.

A classroom is a world of its own, and sometimes it can feel like your entire world. As in any group, there is often a role to play and a person behind it. The two overlap and blur, becoming difficult to distinguish or recognize. But we believe it is even harder to portray this complexity with such extraordinary precision and vulnerability, welcoming us into even the most shameful and claustrophobic corners.

Moving effortlessly from the feverish intensity of adolescence to its most painful and cruel aspects, the cast of La Gradiva took us along on their school trip. In each of the characters, we recognize something of the kids we still are, while the subtle dynamics between them remind us of someone we once knew and should probably reconnect with. It is with great pleasure that we present the Silver Hugo for Best Ensemble Performance to the cast of La Gradiva.

This screenplay turns a chance meeting between two women into a conversation neither of them wants to end. As the story unfolds and takes unexpected detours, it reveals itself as a profound meditation on care and our own finitude, and as a manifesto for another way of being with others and with the world. A world where what matters most is the time we take to listen and speak, walk and touch, and where the roles we are assigned can be reversed. For this, we award Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Léa Le Dimna the Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay for All of a Sudden.

Senzo Ueno, cinematographer of Look Back, paints a hypnotizing depiction of both pastoral rural Japan and the stunning imagined worlds of Manga and Anime. His deft photography captures a dream-like innocent childhood of two emerging artists and the worlds they live in and imagine. For this portrait of beauty, real and fantastic, we award him the Silver Hugo for Best Cinematography.

From the very first frame of this film, it is clear that we are not in a realistic world, but moving further and further into spaces that more closely resemble states of mind. One element accompanies us throughout, enriching the immense creativity of this work. It starts off subtle and becomes increasingly evident. The transformation or distortion of reality is masterfully executed. The visual effects play a major role in this. Therefore, this year’s award for outstanding technical achievement goes to the VFX department of The Spiral, directed by Paolo Strippoli.

The Gold Hugo goes to Gessica Généus’ for Marie Madeleine. For her bold feature film that is as visually inventive as her world view is unique. Généus takes us on a fascinating journey through Haiti’s rich storytelling tradition and the tensions inherent in the complex social, political, and religious currents of contemporary life on that island nation.

The Silver Hugo goes to Grzegorz Debowski for What Belongs to Others. A universal portrait of contemporary alienation, director Grzegorz Debowski’s masterful command of tension and deeply empathetic lens places the viewer directly into the shoes of a lost soul in Warsaw. Kasia has to lose everything in order to come into her own sense of self and find the value of community. Debowski illuminates this through an austerity of technique that draws out the humanism at the center of the story.

At the core of documentary filmmaking is the act of documenting—of framing, capturing, and co-creating reality as it unfolds. In her decades-long photographic series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, Alessandra Sanguinetti approaches this act as a sustained collaboration, allowing imaginative play and the passage of time to shape the work together.

With this in mind, the Golden Hugo goes to The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, directed by Alessandra Sanguinetti. Through her tender, humorous, and feminist gaze, Sanguinetti invites us to watch her longtime photographic subjects, Belinda and Guillermina, play, perform, and grow up over 25 years. We felt invited into the life of an extended family and the culture of rural Argentina, learning from the wisdom of three generations of women. Throughout, the director remains kind and steadfast, allowing our understanding to deepen as her participants grow older. We found ourselves smiling with Belinda and Guillermina as they changed in ways both somber and joyful, surprising and inevitable.

Through a vibrant mix of video resolutions, frame rates, and aspect ratios — alongside Sanguinetti’s still photography — the film radiates with unvarnished beauty and accidental poetry. It surprises us with delightful moments preserved in the edit, and enlightens us through visual and spoken reflections on what it means to be alive. The film’s title invites us into the illusion of an everlasting summer. Had it not come to an end, we would have happily continued watching this story unfold.

The Silver Hugo goes to Tricontinental: Letter to Open In Case Of, directed by Laura Cazador, a film that asks us what the political role of cinema was in the revolutionary 1960s, and what it is now. The film’s protagonist is Michèle Firk, a film journalist who sacrificed everything to engage in revolutionary struggle. Through voiceover and archival footage, the film reveals how countries in the Global South, weary of colonial powers, banded together to dream of a new order. Grounded in Firk’s experience, the film is both a call to action and a gutting, tragic story about an important but little-known woman revolutionary.

In an artfully crafted dialogue between Cazador and Firk, the archive springs to life through complex montage. We appreciated the moving construction of these two women’s voices, speaking to each other across time in a captivating epistolary mode.

In framing the past through a contemporary lens, the film asks viewers to push back against the United States’ ongoing neocolonialism, to confront the genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine, and to question other global conflicts in which the United States is an aggressor. The film ends with an urgent call to action, asking us to consider what we, as filmmakers, can do to inspire change and continue the fight for a more equitable world.

The Gold Q-Hugo goes to Summer Drift, directed by Céline Carridroit and Aline Suter. This hybrid documentary is a breezy summer exploration that bathes audiences in its celebratory, kaleidoscopic telling of a trans life well lived. Beautifully shot in lush 16mm, we’re privileged to live with our magnetic protagonist, Johanna Schopfer. Schopfer’s self-possessed performance and dry humor is complemented by the warmth of her longstanding friendships and the thrills of watching her reclaim the hobby to drag-race her Volkswagen Beetle again. The filmmakers collage elements of fantastical and dreamlike moments, including her own vivid cartoon illustrations in which the film centers the creative power of a woman ready to transform her hardest moments to fuel a better life. The nuanced representation entirely reframes the transphobia that Johanna has faced. Summer Drift allows the audience to delightfully experience the quietly affecting bliss of quality time with Johanna.

The Silver Q-Hugo goes to The Man I Love, directed by Ira Sachs. A delicate, melancholy meditation on the heartbreak of living boldly, out loud, and with fervor in the face of inevitable decline during the AIDS crisis. Ira Sachs’ harmonious direction and attention to detail shine throughout, and the exquisite rapport between the actors and the darkly indelible characters they portray draws us into a world of tender desire. The film offers an effortless narrative and spellbinding performances by Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford, Rebecca Hall, and a radiant supporting cast that completes their social circle, showcasing a familiar rendering of queer community. The liberatory spirit of the film invites the possibility of a world filled with profound beauty and passion.

A Special Mention goes to Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building by Bruno Santamaría Razo for its daring direction in his impressive narrative feature debut. The film deeply moved the jury with its use of the filmmaker’s own home as stage for a blend of recreated childhood scenes and present-day interviews with family, laying bare an indelible and intimate portrait of finding one’s queer identity in the shadow of the AIDS crisis.

Chicago is a city rooted in beauty, humanity, and resilience. One specific image came up several times in our deliberation as a particularly strong rendering of our city’s core virtues: a loving family carrying their father through a harsh winter’s snow and ice. An image of a family continuing to find a way to persist, continuing to find joy, creativity, and laughter amid harrowing circumstances.

The City/State jury recognizes Arlieta Hall and Brittany Alsot’s Finding Your Laughter for its ability to illuminate the beauty and resilience of the human spirit. At the center of Finding Your Laughter is a woman pursuing her artistic ambitions while confronting the personal realities of caring for her father’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. In so doing, the film offers a compelling meditation on familial responsibility and the courage required to hold space for another person without losing sight of oneself. Deeply grounded in Chicago’s rich soil, the film brings intimate specificity into conversation with universal questions about dignity, belonging, and the many forms love can take. Hall’s presence in the film and the crew’s humble filmmaking approach offer a unique vulnerability and dedication to a lasting impact in how we can all approach care and story. For this resonant affirmation of the enduring power of human connection, the jury is honored to present Finding Your Laughter with the Chicago Award.

Gill follows the professional and personal lives of a group of Cuban nurses; a portrait of rare, insightful realism that stayed with the jury long after its pensive runtime. Lyrically attuned to the ebbs and flows of daily life—as well as the realities of the healthcare system in Cuba—Gill never loses sight of the self, examining the relationship women have to their bodies, their feelings, and each other. Its visual language beautifully captures everything that is unspoken and trusts its audience to reach and understand the depths the story offers.

The Silver Hugo goes to Asheghetam for testing the possibilities of the cinematic medium. Its combination of animation and live action creates a surrealist, survivalist story that immerses just as much as it challenges its audience. The subversion of stereotypical iconography and depictions of violence offer a complex, new perspective on how to navigate tropes through experimentation. Asheghetam never loses the complex realities of its characters in its provocative experimentation: Reality threatens to intrude at the fringe of every vibrant, handcrafted frame, grounded in the fragility of youth and longing.

The Gold Hugo goes to Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon for its masterful use of body-cam and cellphone footage to create an urgent portrait of community resistance against the abduction of a Chicago neighbor. The jury commends Bill Morrison’s ability to immerse the audience in an uncompromising and visceral viewing experience that reflects the layers of violence, absurdity, and uncertainty surrounding the presence of ICE agents in the city. In its commitment to portraying a difficult reality, Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon offers audiences, present and future, an opportunity for reflection and learning.

The Silver Hugo goes to Buckskin, a fervent and sensorial rendering of Black life and the historical plunder of the natural environment. Punctuated by a patchwork of temporalities and archival texture, the jury commends Mars Verrone’s stilling memorial of a distinctive family history. With the question of memory and the climate crisis at the fore, Buckskin is ultimately a balm, and it is also an entry point for audiences to contend with the urgency of collective action and tenderness in our present day.

Fingerbang invites its audience to lower its guard with humor, absurdity, and a striking visual language, only to transform that playful world into something deeply unsettling. Through beautiful animation, a limited color palette, and surreal imagery, the film tells a simple story about the desire for touch, connection, and the vulnerability that comes with seeking affection in an increasingly isolated world. It moves seamlessly between the funny, the tragic, and the horrifying, finding an unconventional and original way to express an experience that feels painfully familiar. The result is a film that is bold, visceral, and unlike anything else, with images that stay with you long after the film ends.

A Little Death maps the familiar parent-child relationship onto the unlikely world of the Grim Reaper, creating an adorable and heartfelt story about patience, self-doubt, and the challenges of understanding a new generation. At its center is a touching intergenerational conflict between a father devoted to tradition and a child determined to carry that legacy in their own way. Stunning crosshatched black-and-white illustrations give the film a distinctive visual world, while impeccable animation and fluid pacing bring warmth and humor to its exploration of learning to listen, trust, and make room for change. Charming, funny, and beautifully crafted, A Little Death leaves us both entertained and deeply moved.