We’re proud to announce the winners of the 2017 Vidlings & Tapeheads Film Festival! We had an incredible slate of forty-three short films from around the world, including our Made in Michigan program which highlighted homegrown talent. We can’t wait to see what our alum do next! Many thanks to our programmers and jury for their curation and dedication to promoting these unconventional projects. Prizes have been generously provided by Final Draft, Wacom, ProAm USA, Toon Boom, Transcend, HitFilm, Red Giant, QuickFilmBudget, Couch and more!! Now, without further ado…
Winner Best of Fest: Cake
(9:22, USA) Directed by Anne Hu (website)
Eliza, a bisexual woman, tries to explore her sexuality within her marriage with her husband Thomas by surprise ordering a seemingly human female sex robot. But the sex robot is not the cure-all she had hoped for. Be careful what you wish for.
Winner Best of Fest (Student): Emerald Ice
(15:59, USA) Directed by Jesseca Ynez Simmons (website)
Emerald Ice is a cinematic journey exploring the mind of the American poet Diane Wakoski. Narrated by the poet herself, the audience assumes the side of the reader as facts of the author’s life weave through enigmatic, fantastical and fractured stories.
Winner Best Fiction: Freeze
(15:00, Singapore) Directed by Nelicia Low (website)
When her husband cannot give her the love she desires, the lonely and insecure Hui will do anything to feel loved.
Winner Best Animation: Tough
(4:49, UK) Directed by Jennifer Zheng (website)
New light is shed on childhood cultural misunderstandings when a Chinese mother and her British born daughter speak as adults for the first time.
Winner Best Documentary: Jordy in Transitland
(6:00, Netherlands) Directed by Willem Timmers (website)
Jordy is on the brink of her physical transition. Especially now, wandering in the realm between man and woman, she feels that the dichotomy is more poignant than ever. Must she conform herself to fit in? And what is the price for doing so? A modern, raw fairytale as a poetic protest against today’s parochialism.
Winner Best Made in Michigan: Monk of Milkweed
(3:24) Directed by Harrison Schaeffer (website)
The lonely pink garden. The one-eyed pest. The man made of roots. The woman and her cane.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Honorable Mention Fiction: Ok, Call Me Back
(4:47, USA) Directed by Emily Ann Hoffman (website)
Craving companionship, a woman leaves a voicemail late at night.
Honorable Mention Documentary: Back To Abstraction
(9:58, USA) Directed by Matthew Quezada (website)
Stacy Elaine Dacheux’s autobiographical narrative unpacks the artist’s own associations with the concept of abstraction, not just in relation to art history, but life itself.
Vidlings & Tapeheads Film Festival 2017 Jury
Antonia de Barros
Antonia is a filmmaker based in LA. She studied at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts Film & Television grad program then transitioned into her career in post-production on projects such as Star Trek Beyond and How To Be Single. She is currently working as an Assistant VFX Editor on the Netflix drama Stranger Things.
IMDB
Andrea Eis
Andrea Eis is an artist working in film, photography and works on fabric. She has shown her work in France, China, Greece, Hungary, Scotland and Sweden, as well as around the United States. Andrea has her MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art; BFA in photography/film/video from Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and BA in classics and anthropology from Beloit College. She is Professor and Director of Cinema Studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
Andrea Eis Art
Calder Greenwood
Calder has been making art his whole life, in various mediums: narrative film, music videos, shorts, street art, cardboard statues, halloween costumes, sets and props. He’s a director, writer, production designer, propmaker, set builder, model maker, and VFX artist. Calder lives in downtown Los Angeles with his guard dog, A1334462, among his many creations.
Asobi Productions
Meera Menon
Meera Menon is a writer, director, and editor. In 2013, her feature directorial debut, Farah Goes Bang, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; as the film’s co-writer/director, Meera was awarded the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize for a groundbreaking woman filmmaker by Tribeca and Vogue. That year, she was also showcased as one of Glamour Magazine’s “35 women under 35 running Hollywood.” She was selected to be a fellow at 20th Century Fox’s Global Directors Initiative. Her second feature, a female driven Wall Street drama titled Equity, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Sony Pictures Classics.
She received her BA in English and Art History from Columbia University, and her MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Meera’s father, Vijayan Menon, is a film producer and founder of Tara Arts, which has served as a cultural ambassador to members of the Indian diaspora for over thirty years, showcasing various musical and cinema artists from South India. As a result, Meera grew up in the South Asian film industry and won a national television award in India for her performance on the hit TV show “American Dreams” when she was 18. In addition to her filmmaking career, Meera has worked as a curator for contemporary film and video art festivals in Paris, Miami, and New York; in 2008, she curated an exhibition of over 100 independent artists at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.
She works and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, cinematographer Paul Gleason, under the commercial banner Elephant Shoe Pictures. Meera tends to use humor as a defense mechanism, and wonders if the U.S. Department of Defense might consider doing the same.
meeramenon.com
Ethan Minsker
Ethan Minsker’s descriptors include writer, filmmaker, artist, and publisher, creator, and editor-in-chief of Psycho Moto Zine, which has been in publication since 1988. Minsker is a founding member of the Antagonist Movement, an East Village/LES-based group of artists, writers, and musicians that promotes lesser-known works by up-and-coming talent. This group was recently featured in his newest film, Self Medicated, a documentary on the struggles artists face to stay happy. Self Medicated: a film about art won the DIY award at the 2014 RxSM Film Festival. Ethan was also the recipient of the ACKER Award for Visual Arts 2016.
Man In Camo Trailer
Andrea Claire Morningstar
Andrea Claire Morningstar is a filmmaker, artist and educator living and working in both Detroit, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Across mediums, Morningstar tells stories that have a palpable intimacy between maker and subject. Morningstar’s work asks the viewer to appreciate the human vulnerability on both sides of the camera, and calls for a greater degree of intimacy between the observer and the observed in everyday life.
She has BFA in New Genres from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and an MFA in Filmmaking from University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. She has taught filmmaking at Interlochen Center for the Arts, The Maine Media Workshops, University of Missouri – Columbia, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools and Detroit Future Schools.
Her short films, photographs, installations and performances have exhibited in festivals and galleries in the US and abroad. She has also produced several stories for radio, print and web. Her passion for documentary work started with a radio piece called My Pen Pal, about a young girl’s unlikely friendship with a demonized leader of a foreign nation, which became a feature story on This American Life.
andreaclairemorningstar.com
Thu Tran
Thu Tran is an artist and writer making videos, videogames, and comics. She has produced work for Museum of Moving Images, Super Deluxe, and was the co-creator, co-writer, and host of cooking series Food Party for IFC and Late Night Munchies for MTVother. Her new comic book, Dust Pam, comes out this summer through Peow Studio. Currently, she lives and works in Brooklyn NY, with her precious cat, Silk.
thutran.com | peowstudio.com | twitter: @thutran666 | ig: @thuuuuuuuuuuuuu (13 u’s)
Jerry White Jr.
Jerry is a filmmaker from Metro Detroit, Michigan. As an actor, director, and producer, he has screened films at over a hundred film festivals worldwide, winning numerous awards as well as securing international distribution. He earned his M.F.A. in Film & Television Production from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in 2013. Since 2015 he’s been a programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival, served as a juror for FilmQuest, Oak Cliff Film Festival, and the Knoxville Film Festival, and added programming duties for FilmQuest in 2017. Jerry founded the Vidlings & Tapeheads Film Festival to promote unconventional narrative filmmaking and bring progressive and eclectic voices together.
vidlingsandtapeheads.com | jerrywhitejr.com | 30mom.com