2026 WVMSFF Awards
Congratulations to the award-winning artists in this year’s film festival. We are very proud to show your works and present these awards to you!
And a huge THANK YOU to everyone who submitted this year!
Earth and Sky Award
En su sombra fértil
Andrés Dávila | Colombia
In the Sibundoy Valley, Mercedes Cuatindioy cultivates her chagra as an act of resistance and memory. Through the way she plants, cares for, and interacts with her plants, she transmits indigenous knowledge that is threatened by oblivion and monoculture
Andrés Dávila is an audiovisual artist whose artistic practice explores the relationship between ethnography and experimental cinema.
Body And Spirit Award
All of This Must Be Paid For
Gabi Rudin | United States
The wellness universe evaluates the spiritual mechanics of the pain-body as it searches for answers.
Gabi Rudin is a teaching artist and filmmaker living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is interested in the ways we cope with being a body in a system.
Time Theme Award
Fracture Summer
Kym McDaniel | United States
Unexpected broken bones in June. The sun passing through the kitchen. Bursts of summer rain. Time is marked through light changing in my apartment, chosen family visiting, playing the piano, and getting my period. My broken Super 8 camera needs to be shaken for the shutter release to catch, and I wonder how to stay functioning, myself. The document of being unable to walk during an especially Crip summer inside my apartment.
Kym McDaniel is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of moving image, choreography, and disability studies.
Best Regional Work
Cosmonaut OpRemix
Timothy Nohe | United States
CosmonautOpReMix (2025) offers a vibrant and kinetic journey into Soviet-era spaceflight. Artist and composer Timothy Nohe transforms public domain mission footage through video synthesis and music, crafting a hyperreal and visually stunning interpretation of a crewed Earth orbit mission.
Timothy Nohe is an artist, composer, and educator who engages with both traditional and electronic media in civic life and public spaces. His work has focused on sustainability and place, as well as creating musical and video pieces for dance and live performance.
Best Experimental Work
The Story of
the Cricket Queen
Natalie Peracchio | United States
The “Story of The Cricket Queen” recreates digital media tropes, trends, and aesthetics with analog film techniques.
I’m an LA-based filmmaker and animator with a background in experimental and DIY filmmaking. My work embraces physical media, focusing on direct animation on 16mm film and frequent use of found materials.
The unpredictability of analog processes deeply informs my filmmaking practice, where the unseen outcome becomes an integral part of the creative journey. I create films using a collage of techniques, blending elements of performance, fiction, and documentary cinema.
Best Short Narrative
PAPA
Florias Welch Gallay | Switzerland
An elderly woman, on the threshold of death, prepares to reunite with her father. We accompany her in this reunion through a poetic and spiritual film.
Best Documentary
On Camera
Jackie Mishol | United States
Using what her mother has left behind, a camera-woman’s director daughter teaches herself cinematography across the country; it’s up to her to piece their story together, in this experimental documentary that explores identity, purpose, legacy, women in film, and the connection of an artist to their maternal muse.
Mishol is an up-and-coming young director, artist, and filmmaker based out of the Paris of Appalachia, Pittsburgh, PA. She cares deeply about making meaningful work and telling stories with heart.
Best VR Project
Midst the Sky
Kiley Brandt | United States
6:31 min Original poetry intertwined with excerpts from historic Wilmington-born David Bryant Fulton’s works: “Hanover; The Persecution of the Lowly. Story of the Wilmington Massacre” and “Recollections of a Sleeping Car Porter”, read by Elton Burgest. A poetic exploration of time, grief, and contemplating the multi layers of home on lands that hold memory beyond our own.
Best Animation
Fačuk
Maida Srabovic | Croatia/Slovenia
In a God-fearing village lying between two rivers, giving birth to a fachuk — an illegitimate child — is a mortal sin. Everyone in the village recoils from the young pregnant woman who is about to give birth at any moment. In this narrow-minded and harsh rural environment, fear grows inside her.
Maida Srabovic (1986, Koprivnica) completed her studies in film and TV editing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. After graduating, she worked as a freelance editor for several years, editing numerous films and TV formats. In 2018, she co-founded the animation and postproduction studio TETRABOT in Zagreb.
Best Student Experimental Work
Fumble
Mahsa Talebiani | United States
A series of lighthearted performative vignettes that explore the duality of immigrant and queer life, the longing to return to the familiar geographic, cultural, and bodily coordinates of the past, alongside an equally compelling desire to assimilate into a new culture and identity. It depicts both the attempts and failures to fit in and explores the felt incongruities of this experience in a hybrid form.
Mahsa Talebiani is an experimental filmmaker exploring the intersections of queerness and diaspora experience. Their work delves into the sensory explorations within intercultural cinema, often showcasing their own body to manifest an embodied vulnerability. Through performance, video art, and sculptural space, they challenge traditional narrative film structures and hierarchical productions.
Best Student Animation
Service Bus
Elmer Lodemel | demmark
We all know the service button on airplanes—but what about the ones on buses? When a bored traveler stumbles upon one, his curiosity gets the better of him. But with only the bus driver on duty, pressing it might lead to unexpected consequences.
Elmer is an animation director and creator from Norway who graduated from The Animation Workshop in 2025 with the film Service Bus.
He strives to spread joy through telling comedic stories along with well-composed images.
Best Student Narrative
Miracles Happen Every Day
Sloane Ren | United States
Tired of his mundane, newly adult life, Andrew Gadd is determined to get on a better track. But while eating out before an Iggy Pop concert, his friends have a different plan.
Best Young Filmmaker
The bunny
Isaiah Supadi & Oscar Smith | Australia
Five years after his sister vanished on Easter night, sixteen-year-old Johnny lives in a town still scarred by her disappearance. When chocolate eggs begin appearing again and whispers of the Easter Bunny resurface, Johnny is forced to confront a truth no one wants to believe. As grief, guilt, and childhood myth collide, The Bunny descends into a chilling exploration of the unknown, innocence, and the cost of keeping ancient horrors alive.
Isaiah Supadi and Oscar Smith are teenage, aspiring West Australian directors, writers, and editors who specialise in psychological thrillers, action-driven crime, mystery, and extreme horror. They have collaborated on multiple projects across genres they are equally passionate about, including action, mystery, psychological thrillers, and horror.
Best WVU Student Work
I fear what’s in my cells
Aiden Crawford | United States
They're in the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and in the air we breathe. They've pervaded every ecosystem in the world, from coral reefs to Antarctic ice. And they've infiltrated the human body. Microplastics link us directly to our weakened ecosystem. I fear what will happen to the bodies of both.
Aiden Crawford is a senior Digital Art and Animation major who is interested in mixed narrative and experimental video art.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Hurricane Season
Michelle Trujillo | United States
10 52
Amirmohammad Zand | Iran
Voices of the mountains
Laboratory for visual storytelling | Tajikistan
Dollhouse Elephant
Jenny Jokela | Finland
Please give a round of applause to the following films.
Petty People
Yang Yi | United States
Project Selkie
Ryleigh Moule | United States
Black Saturday!
Alexander Colt Young | United States
The Red Thread
Peyton Rhian Fitz | United States
You Look Familiar
Brooke Haller | United States
Organized by the Digital Art & Animation area in the WVU School of Art and Design and founded in 2010, the WVMSFF has been a hub for independent and experimental filmmakers worldwide, bringing diverse cultural and artistic perspectives to West Virginia and the Appalachian region.