"Thursday Till Sunday masterfully uses landscape to convey interpersonal dynamics with keen sensitivity and insight. Unease and awakening are indelibly entwined in the film's deceptively simple family road trip, creating a nuanced and elegiac coming-of-age story. The debut feature of Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor is evidence of an exciting new talent."

"The jury found Drought to be a film of extraordinary caliber-epic in scope, keen and intimate in its observational perspective, beautifully filmed and edited with a sparse and affecting soundscape. Through this powerful film, the story of a remote Mexican community grappling with a growing drought becomes a universal parable and an alarming harbinger."

"The jury prize for best animated/experimental short goes to Joseph Pierce's The Pub, a haunting portrayal of everyday life in a bar in North London, seen through the eyes of a lonely bartender. At times, striking beautiful and at times, terrifyingly grotesque, the imaginative and exquisite use of animation gives the film its depth and opens up a door into the humanity of the regular characters of this joint - loners, drunks, old-timers - letting us peak for an instant into their souls and the demons that hover around them."

"Quite often, documentary filmmakers take a literal, visually straightforward approach to their subject matter, sidestepping experimentation with the language of cinema. Director Josh Gibson's Kudzu Vine was not only filled with information on the sturdy kudzu vine -it's history; the many and unexpected uses for it - but employed a visual style perched somewhere between gothic and otherworldly. Hugely educational and wonderfully stylistic, Kudzu Vine is this year's winner for Best Documentary Short."

"Grainger David's narrative short, The Chair, is a lyrical, gorgeous meditation on death, grief and resilience as filtered through a young boy's fluid memory. Set in the humid American south, and filmed on landscapes that are familiar, on one hand, and rendered as poetic dreamscapes, on the other, the short film is ultimately a moving coming-of-age film in which a family tragedy nudges its young protagonist to muse on matters that have concerned great minds throughout the ages - religion, family, morality, and the ways in which we are all connected."

"Commanding and utterly unforced, the ensemble cast of Joshua Sanchez's Four inhabit their characters with compelling specificity. At the same time, their pitch-perfect collaborative energy honors and deepens the tone of the material. As lonely individuals in various states of crisis, Wendell Pierce, Emory Cohen, E.J. Bonilla and Aja Naomi King are fearless in the vulnerability they bring to their roles."

"All is Well, a Lisbon-set exploration of the immigrant experience and, especially, of the bond between siblings, is a work of striking visual eloquence and emotional honesty. As sisters navigating a new country, together and separately, Cheila Lima and Ciomara Morais deliver performances of searing intimacy. Filmmaker Pocas Pascoal has transformed her personal story of exile from Angola into a deeply affecting drama, whose cinematic power if particularly impressive in the work of a first-time feature director."