The winners of the 12th Annual Easterseals Disability Film Challenge Awards were announced Thursday night at the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City.
Designed to promote and encourage more film and television works by artists with disabilities, this year’s Easterseals challenge tasked filmmakers with creating short films one-to-five minutes in length that exist within the thriller and suspense genres. As usual, challenge participants had just five days to craft their shorts. The cast and crew of each film had to consist of volunteers, and at least one person with a physical or cognitive disability was encouraged to be involved in the making of each short in an on-camera or behind-the-scenes capacity.
Of the 123 shorts that were submitted this year, just five ultimately took home the challenge’s top awards. In addition to host, actor and Easterseals founder Nic Novicki, Thursday night’s event was attended by Peter Farrelly (“Green Book”), Skye P. Marshall (“Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”), Marissa Bode (“Wicked”), Jesse Metcalfe (“Desperate Housewives”) and others.
The event’s sponsors included Adobe, Amazon MGM Studios, IMDbPro, Netflix, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Pictures, Comcast NBCUniversal, Walt Disney Studios, SAG-AFTRA and Dell Technologies. The winners of this year’s awards each received a $2,000 grant, $5,000 seed fund/film finishing grant provided by Adobe, a Dell computer, a one year-membership to IMDBPro and a one-year Film Independent membership.
Winners also received mentorship meetings with Robert Baltazar, the vice president of TV programming DEI at NBCUniversal; Ivana Lombardi, the director of film at Netflix; Karen Noble, the director of filmmaker and content strategies at Universal Filmed Entertainment Group; Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, the West Coast executive vice president of entertainment diversity and inclusion at Paramount Global; and Steven O’Dell, the president of marketing and distribution for Sony Pictures Releasing International.
You can read the full list of this year’s Easterseals Disability Film Challenge Awards nominees and winners below:
Best Actor
Dashiell Meier, “Day 21” (WINNER)
Nat Luna, “Hypothetically, The End”
Fay Kanevsk, “Do No Harm”
Danny J. Gomez, “The Deadline”
Best Awareness Campaign
Anna Pakman, “Emergency Plan” (WINNER)
Hope Baker, “Silent Control”
Steven Charles Ching, “20/80”
Allison Friedman, “Erased”
Best Director
Shane Hillier, “Everhand” (WINNER)
Elisa Richards, “Caught”
Rachel Handler & Crystal Arnette, “Don’t Take This The Wrong Way”
Chrissy Marshall, “The Invalids”
Best Editor
Lily Drummond, “Hypothetically, The End” (WINNER)
Shane Hillier, “Everhand”
Crystal Arnette, “Don’t Take This The Wrong Way”
Chrissy Marshall, “The Invalids”
Best Writer
Steve Way & Danny Kurtzman, “We’ll Meet Again” (WINNER)
Erin Neumeyer, “Banned”
Rachel Handler, “Don’t Take This The Wrong Way”
Lily Drummond & Nat Luna, “Hypothetically, The End”
Best Film
Lee Cleaveland, “Everhand” (WINNER)
Patrick Ivison, “The Invalids”
Lily Drummond, “Hypothetically, The End”
Marisa Hamamoto, “Killed It”
