2026 SPE Media Festival

2026 SPE MEDIA FESTIVAL 

Atlanta, Georgia

March 19, 2026: Media Festival Opening and Winners Screenings 

6:30 – 9:00 pm at Savannah College of Art and Design

March 20, 2026: Screenings 5:30 – 9:30 pm at Courtland Grand Hotel

March 21, 2026: Screenings 6:00 – 9:30 pm at Courtland Grand Hotel

 

Festival Director: Amanda Le Kline

Jurors: Janis Be, Lynn Estomin, Fatemeh Fani, Amanda Kline, Nika McKagen, 

Cynthia Miller, Maedeh Ojaghloo, Kaitlyn Smith, Krista Leigh Steinke, Riel Sturchio, 

Leni Wiegand

 

THURSDAY, MARCH 19, SAVANNAH COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

 

BEST WOMEN'S FILM

Narmook | 6:45 pm

Directed by Ghazal Zoghiniya | Distribution: ghazalzoghiniya@gmail.com | 2025 | 19:38 min.

Malalai is a teenage girl from the Baloch community in Iran. Due to a traditional cultural practice, she has been wearing boys' clothing for years. Now that she has reached puberty, she must return to the world of girls, but she is experiencing an identity crisis.

 

BEST MULTI-CULTURAL FILM

Nabi | 7:05 pm

Directed by Hamed Golshahi | Distribution: hamedgolshahi.art@gmail.com | 2024 | 20:00 min.

Nabi is an Afghan migrant worker in Iran who is fired as a janitor after 25 years of working in a tower. He must fulfill his 25-year-old duties for the last day and leave like a man who never existed.

 

BEST PRIDE FILM

Butterfly Kiss | 7:25 pm

Directed by Zohar Dvir | Distribution: distribution@fabianfred.com | 2024 | 10:00 min.

Carol panics and argues with her girlfriend Ray after an unexpected proposal. The situation gets worse when she wakes up in an apocalyptic reality and terribly discovers that Ray has transformed into a butterfly. Ray's transformation, the invasion of the outside world into their home, and the growing tension between the two threaten their relationship. 

 

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

Dosta Dosta | 7:35 pm

Directed by Julia Novacek | Distribution: info@julianovacek.com | 2025 | 30:00 min.

Dosta Dosta shows the courage of three generations of women in the Balkans who claim public space with their bodies, refusing to remain subordinate to the patriarchal system. They step out to mourn, perform and protest. The film follows mourning women, political activists from Women in Black and dancers in Serbia and Montenegro, uniting their stories. 

 

BEST NARRATIVE FILM

Rose | 8:05 pm

Directed by Amirhossein Hashtroodi | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2025 | 18:03 min.

The film is a humanistic tale set in the snowy mountains, where poverty and harsh cold prevail. A man and his pregnant wife, who work with a group of porters to make a living, face an unexpected crisis on their journey. Meanwhile, at a border post, a young guard is caught between obeying his commander and following the call of his conscience.

 

BEST ANIMATED FILM

HOLY HEAVÊNESS | 8:23 pm

Directed by Farnoosh Abedi, Negah Khezre Fardyardad, Mohammad Ghaffari | Distribution: farnoosh.abedi@yahoo.com | 2025 | 10:00 min.

The unbearable lightness of the death of loved ones… There are wounds in life that eat away at you like leprosy…The weight of the death of loved ones sometimes becomes so overwhelming that to get rid of this weight another birth is inevitable.

 

BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Magic Johnson | 8:33 pm

Directed by Enrico J. Green | Distribution: enrico.j.green@icloud.com | 2025 | 5:00 min.

A former military prison guard reflects on his life, one last time.

 

BEST SHORT-SHORT FILM

Paper Flowers | 8:38 pm

Directed by Carlo De Togni | Distribution: info@mondonovo.ai | 2025 | 2:16 min.

Yokohama, 1866. A Japanese origami artisan is hired to pose as a samurai for Western photographer Felice Beato's colonial portraits. As he's transformed into an exotic subject, a silent moment of recognition between photographer and subject disrupts the established order. A meditation on colonial photography and the quiet preservation of selfhood.

 

BEST SPE MEMBER FILM

Erasure | 8:40 pm

Directed by Fatemeh Fani | Distribution: fani.fatemeh1992@gmail.com | 2025 | 3:41 min.

Erasure is a haunting and intimate portrayal of one Iranian woman's journey from silent obedience to unflinching defiance, told through the lens of her earliest memory: the moment a black cloth was pulled over her head at the age of six.

 

FRIDAY, MARCH 20, COURTLAND GRAND HOTEL

 

a film called black: King's Speech | 5:30 pm

Directed by Cam Be | Distribution: info@afilmcalledblack.com | 2024 | 19:20 min.

An evolving film, each screening presents different elements to an ongoing conversation. Blackness. 'King's Speech' is a short film that resides within the entirety of 'a film called black.' 'King's Speech' centers around the conversation of Blackness - What is Blackness? Who gets to define it? Additionally asking Black father's what it means to be a king? It tells a parallel story of Chicago artist Cam Be & Neak's creation of the song and visual story of 'King's Speech.'

 

An Excess Baggage | 5:50 pm

Directed by Myriam Garcia Marienstras | Distribution: raphael@pianosanofilms.fr | 2024 | 16:00 min.

Sophie hides her unhappiness in the close relationship she has with her daughter Lila. When Lila goes away on holiday, Sophie's reality collapses and her anxieties are reawakened. She tries to escape her loneliness by any means necessary.

 

Butterfly Kiss | 6:06 pm

Directed by Zohar Dvir | Distribution: distribution@fabianfred.com | 2024 | 10:00 min.

Carol panics and argues with her girlfriend Ray after an unexpected proposal. The situation gets worse when she wakes up in an apocalyptic reality and is horrified to discover that Ray has transformed into a butterfly. Ray's transformation, the invasion of the outside world into their home, and the growing tension between the two threaten their relationship. 

 

C'est Celestial | 6:16 pm

Directed by Artemis Evlogimenou | Distribution: evlogimenou.arte@gmail.com | 2014 | 5:10 min.

The sequences of various soft porn movies from 35mm film reels were re-edited in a 16mm Steinbeck editing machine, then digitally captured and re-appropriated to suit a different scenario - one woman's bittersweet memories. The aim of the short was to create emotions absent in this genre of films.

 

Collection Title: Turtle | 6:21 pm

Directed by Ehsan Majouni | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2025 | 12:30 min.

A woman is determined to bring her beloved back to life, a man who vanished into the waters in search of a place to call his own. She feels compelled to recall things that have long been dead, hoping her loved one might revive. She believes he will be washed ashore someday, back to her by the tides - a sudden return, as if by magic.

 

Death Closes the Eyes | 6:34 pm

Directed by Afshin Soufian | Distribution: soufian.afshin@gmail.com | 2025 | 15:00 min.

Maryam, a 55-year-old painter, is forced to leave Iran after the harsh crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Years later, she returns to her childhood home and faces memories of her younger self and those difficult days. As past and present collide, Maryam feels the pain of that time once again. This film is dedicated to Maryam Salimian, who took her own life after being banned from leaving Iran during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

 

Dobrina | 6:49 pm

Directed by Hannes Rall | Distribution: mail@hannesrall.com | 2025 | 5:00 min.

Lotte Reiniger meets Sergio Leone in this animated short, where desire burns as bright as the desert sun. A brand-new animated short that premiered in June 2025, successfully touring the festival circuit now.

 

Don't Cry For Me All You Drag Queens | 6:54 pm

Directed by Kristal Sotomayor | Distribution: film@sotomayorproductions.com | 2024 | 9:00 min.

Don't Cry For Me All You Drag Queens pays homage to the legendary Mother Cavallucci by weaving together the present and past to provide a striking portrait of belonging and memory.

 

Dosta Dosta | 7:03 pm

Directed by Julia Novacek | Distribution: info@julianovacek.com | 2025 | 30:00 min.

Dosta Dosta shows the courage of three generations of women in the Balkans who claim public space with their bodies, refusing to remain subordinate to the patriarchal system. They step out to mourn, perform and protest. The film follows mourning women, political activists from Women in Black and dancers in Serbia and Montenegro, uniting their stories. 

 

Erasure | 7:33 pm

Directed by Fatemeh Fani | Distribution: fani.fatemeh1992@gmail.com | 2025 | 3:41 min.

Erasure is a haunting and intimate portrayal of one Iranian woman's journey from silent obedience to unflinching defiance, told through the lens of her earliest memory: the moment a black cloth was pulled over her head at the age of six.

 

Feedback | 7:37 pm

Directed by Hüseyin Mert Erverdi | Distribution: mert.erverdi@gmail.com | 2025 | 4:00 min.

Feedback is an audiovisual work shaped by recursive image processing and layered sound, a study of feedback as a generative system where signals fold back into themselves and produce emergent form. Emerging from streams of abstraction, each frame folds into itself to generate striations, distortions, and drifting textures, evoking a sense of continuous movement and transformation. 

 

Fish Dance | 7:41 pm

Directed by Narges Elahi | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2024 | 15:58 min.

This film is narrated by a female painter who lives with her dead fetus in a remote house and tries to overcome this loss...!

 

HOLY HEAVÊNESS | 7:57 pm

Directed by Farnoosh Abedi, Negah Khezre Fardyardad, Mohammad Ghaffari | Distribution: farnoosh.abedi@yahoo.com | 2025 | 10:00 min.

The unbearable lightness of the death of loved ones… There are wounds in life that eat away at you like leprosy… The weight of the death of loved ones sometimes becomes so overwhelming that to get rid of this weight another birth is inevitable.

 

Magic Johnson | 8:07 pm

Directed by Enrico J. Green | Distribution: enrico.j.green@icloud.com | 2025 | 5:00 min.

A former military prison guard reflects on his life, one last time.

 

Malverde | 8:12 pm

Directed by Claudia Gordillo | Distribution: claudia.gordilloa@gmail.com | 2025 | 17:03 min.

Malverde narrates the rhythms of a land planted with sugarcane. An imposed plant that has recoded native nature and the ways in which human and non-human bodies move to survive. The story takes place in southern Valle del Cauca and northern Cauca, Colombia, and delves into a kind of journey and evocation, in what this extractivist landscape has become today.

 

Monument | 8:30 pm

Directed by Jeremy Drummond | Distribution: jdrummo2@richmond.edu | 2025 | 16:45 min.

Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monumentdeepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration.

 

Moving Spirits: Encountering the Ancestors | 8:47 pm

Directed by Jennifer M. Mizenko, Rhondalyn Peairs | Distribution: thedancelady@gmail.com | 2025 | 33:10 min.

Moving Spirits: Encountering the Ancestors is a 33-minute documentary that blends site-specific performance with personal testimony to uncover the untold stories of the enslaved at Rowan Oak, the historic home in Oxford, Mississippi. The film weaves together archival records, interviews with historians and descendants, and the performances of local dancers who channel the spirits of enslaved.

 

Mr. Meftah | 9:20 pm

Directed by Soheil Darvishparvar | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2024 | 11:13 min.

Mr. Meftah, a man who makes a living from his ceremonial role in cutting red ribbons, unexpectedly falls in love with a company secretary, an encounter that subtly changes the course of his life.

 

SATURDAY, MARCH 21, COURTLAND GRAND HOTEL

 

Nabi | 6:00 pm

Directed by Hamed Golshahi | Distribution: hamedgolshahi.art@gmail.com | 2024 | 20:00 min.

Nabi is an Afghan migrant worker in Iran who is fired as a janitor after 25 years of working in a tower. He must fulfill his 25-year-old duties for the last day and leave like a man who never existed.

Narmook | 6:20 pm

Directed by Ghazal Zoghiniya | Distribution: ghazalzoghiniya@gmail.com | 2025 | 19:38 min.

Malalai is a teenage girl from the Baloch community in Iran. Due to a traditional cultural practice, she has been wearing boys' clothing for years. Now that she has reached puberty, she must return to the world of girls, but she is experiencing an identity crisis.

 

No Faster Than We Are | 6:40 pm

Directed by Mark Schoon | Distribution: maschoon@yahoo.com | 2025 | 6:28 min.

No Faster Than We Are, set in a modern metropolis, is a video that explores the relativity of time on the human condition throughout daily life. It reflects on how we move through space and how that corresponds or diverges with or from our inner perception of time. 

 

Paper Flowers | 6:47 pm

Directed by Carlo De Togni | Distribution: info@mondonovo.ai | 2025 | 2:16 min.

Yokohama, 1866. A Japanese origami artisan is hired to pose as a samurai for Western photographer Felice Beato's colonial portraits. As he's transformed into an exotic subject, a silent moment of recognition between photographer and subject disrupts the established order. A meditation on colonial photography and the quiet preservation of selfhood.

 

Portrait | 6:49 pm

Directed by Farzam Tabibi | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2025 | 15:38 min.

In a photography studio, a woman and a photographer struggle to capture an innocent portrait of the woman. As tension rises between them, new photographs reveal ambiguous truths about the woman, blurring the line between reality and perception.

 

Prayer of the Sea | 7:05 pm

Directed by Martin Gerigk | Distribution: magerigk@gmail.com | 2025 | 6:30 min.

A composer recounts a dream from his youth that inspired the slow movement of his first string quartet, Prayer of the Sea. The dream, depicting a peaceful dissolution into the sea and wind, symbolized his future death. Decades later, rediscovering a drawing from the quartet's premiere - perfectly capturing the dream's essence - revived its emotions. Now older, he reflects on the dream's message: a serene acceptance of life's inevitable end.

 

Rain | 7:12 pm

Directed by Vasilios Papaioannu | Distribution: vasiliospapaioannu@gmail.com | 2024 | 6:01 min.

Rain, as circular shapes of memory imprinted on the fast-paced celluloid or as liquid moving sculptures of the present in digital form, documents a verbal interaction between two people.

 

REST | 7:18 pm

Directed by Ryotaro Miyajima | Distribution: miyajimaryotaro@gmail.com | 2025 | 5:04 min.

When immersed in the contours swelling and waning in the forest of needles, the mundane world drifts away, and we only live to breathe.

 

Rose | 7:23 pm

Directed by Amirhossein Hashtroodi | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2025 | 18:03 min.

The film is a humanistic tale set in the snowy mountains, where poverty and harsh cold prevail. A man and his pregnant wife, who work with a group of porters to make a living, face an unexpected crisis on their journey. Meanwhile, at a border post, a young guard is caught between obeying his commander and following the call of his conscience.

 

 

Scattered Sea | 7:41 pm

Directed by Lia Sáile | Distribution: hello@liasaile.com | 2025 | 13:37 min.

Scattered Sea follows 17 performers spanning two generations from the MENA/Maghreb region and Europe as they trace gestures of relation across borders—within a world fractured by historical trauma, displacement, and the longing for belonging. Through a poetic language of Magical Realism, performance, and documentary, the film constructs speculative spaces for decolonial reflection and future-oriented imaginaries.

 

Shucking Tradition | 7:55 pm

Directed by David Helfer Wells | Distribution: david@davidhwells.com | 2024 | 18:22 min.

Follow a cohort of forward-thinking, hard-working New England women who bring new energy and different perspectives to oyster farming, an industry layered with history. While balancing challenging work-life dynamics, they avoid drawing attention to their gender, subtly upending ingrained stereotypes, proving themselves in this tradition-bound maritime profession.

 

Still Silent | 8:13 pm

Directed by Monteith Paul McCollum | Distribution: mccollum@binghamton.edu | 2025 | 5:00 min.

Frost on the windshield fades to night along a New York highway. In the back of a Rambler, apple trees lean, imagination cracks at the seams. Two lives: one chasing the road, one quietly whispering, pulled by the strange gravity of elsewhere.

 

The Phoenix | 8:18 pm

Directed by Eli Anderson | Distribution: eanderson86@wisc.edu | 2025 | 8:47 min.

The Phoenix is an experimental short film that explores rebirth through trauma and grief. As the protagonist buries symbolic objects from their past in a time capsule, each one marks a step through pain, memory, and renewal. It reflects the painful yet beautiful process of becoming someone new. In the end, they emerge transformed from the ashes of their former self.

 

Three Long Minutes | 8:27 pm

Directed by Gretchen Busl | Distribution: gbusl@twu.edu | 2024 | 3:47 min.

Three Long Minutes draws from the Prelinger home movie archive to explore how light shapes memory. Juxtaposing rare eclipse imagery with everyday domestic fragments, the film emphasizes analog film's material presence and reflects on the fleeting, fragile ways recollection defines and distorts experience.

 

Tie Your Hair | 8:31 pm

Directed by Sheida Makaremi | Distribution: artvision.distribution@gmail.com | 2025 | 9:46 min.

A seven-year-old girl visits an old, beautiful house with her father. It is a house filled with valuables, long abandoned after its owner's death. Everything seems normal until the girl suddenly disappears.

 

Trifles | 8:41 pm

Directed by Yarden Pelach and Ron Kohen | Distribution: asaf@costanza-films.com | 2025 | 25:00 min.

Tamar, a woman traumatized by childhood abuse, clings to her past wounds. In her thirties, she hopes to reveal her terrible secret to her parents for solace.

 

Wind's Heritage | 9:06 pm

Directed by Nasim Soheili | Distribution: soheili.nasim10@gmail.com | 2024 | 29:40 min.

Mohammad Wali Gandami is the last miller who knows the techniques of building and repairing of traditional Iranian windmills. At the age of 68, he is still responsible for the maintenance of windmills in the city of Nashtifan.