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EDA Awards @ Tallgrass Film Festival 2023 – Jennifer Merin reports

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The Alliance of Women film Journalists partnered with Tallgrass Film Festival to present EDA Awards for Best Female Directed Films at the festival’s 21st edition, held in Wichita, Kansas from October 5 to 8, 2023. This is the third consecutive year of the partnership.

With “Stubbornly Independent” as its motto, Tallgrass Film Festival, one of the nation’s leading regional film festivals, founded in 2003, aims to foster an appreciation of the cinematic arts by creating shared experiences around the international medium of film. Women in film are high priority on the festival’s agenda and the program presents a high percentage of female-directed films.

This year, AWFJ presented EDA Awards in two categories:

  • Best Female-Directed Feature Film (Narrative or Documentary)
  • Best Female-Directed Short Film(Narrative or Documentary)

Two jury panels of AWFJ members selected the winners from films nominated by the festival, including five narrative films and seven short films.

The AWFJ EDA Award winners were announced and awards presented to their worthy winners at the Tallgrass Film Festival’s awards ceremony on Saturday, October 8 at Wichita’s historic Orpheum Cinema.

THE EDA AWARD WINNERS:

BEST FEMALE-DIRECTED FILM: Black Barbie: A Documentary, Directed by Lagueria Davis

    Jury statement: The winner of the AWFJ EDA Award for Best Female Directed feature is a wonderful example of personal-as-political documentary filmmaking, and it is an essential companion to that other Barbie movie. We were happy and grateful to meet the talented and articulate Black women who were interviewed about their relationship to dolls, and to a pop culture in which almost everyone is white, and how positive representation reflects social issues and affects self-worth. The film also tells the story of the executive team who created and curated the dolls and the Black design teams who helped to give a face to a doll that finally represented images of girls that saw themselves reflected in the toys they loved. Toys are never just toys, and so this documentary actually is a reflection of the culture at large,

BEST FEMALE-DIRECTED SHORT: Jelly directed by Anndi Jinelle Liggett

    Jury statement: Writer-director Anndi Jinelle Liggett takes us to Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, where we follow precocious young troublemaker Jelly (Khloe Bruno) and her mischievous younger cousins Sam and Squeaky (Christopher Woodley and Farah Fellsbret). Already fascinated with death, Jelly sets out to solve the mystery when she overhears her mother talking about a missing neighbor. Khloe Bruno’s Jelly is so charming that you want to take her home with you even though you know she will be a constant handful. Warmly narrated by Andre Holland, this short has a wonderful, authentic sense of fun and mystery and turns out to be surprisingly poignant.

SPECIAL MENTION: This is Concrete, directed by Alice Gosti and June Zandona

    Jury Statement: Dance can be a particularly tricky medium to capture on film since it can be difficult to adequately convey the power and immediacy of live performance. So, co-directors Alice Gosti, a performance artist, choreographer, filmmaker and founder of the Seattle-based performance and dance ensemble MALACARNE, and June Zandona, a director and cameraperson from Washington state, deserve kudos for making “this is concrete” a captivating short cinema experience. The short film is set on and in the abandoned military bunkers of Fort Worden National Park in Washington state, where a quartet of women dancers, clad in matching pink jumpsuits, create their own sort of architecture through movement and teamwork. The dancers bring a powerful and healing feminine energy to an abandoned place built for warfare, while celebrating the natural world steadily reclaiming the space.

AWFJ JURORS

AWFJ’s BEST FEMALE-DIRECTED FEATURE jury included

  • Jamie Broadnax
  • MaryAnn Johanson
  • Jennifer Merin (Chair)

AWFJ’s BEST FEMALE-DIRECTED SHORT jury included

  • Lonita Cook
  • Brandy McDonnell (Chair)
  • Rachel West

The jurors on both panels agreed that this year’s roster of nominated films was exceptional, and very much a credit to Tallgrass Film Festival’s female-forward programmers Melanie Addington, Andre Seward and Hannah Bothner.

For more information about all of the 2023 Tallgrass Film Festival award winners, visit the Tallgrass Film Festival Website.

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Jennifer Merin

Jennifer Merin is the Film Critic for Womens eNews and contributes the CINEMA CITIZEN blog for and is managing editor for AWFJ.org, the online magazine of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, of which she is President. She has served as a regular critic and film-related interviewer for The New York Press and About.com. She has written about entertainment for USA Today, The L.A. Times, US Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Endless Vacation Magazine, NY Daily News, New York Post, SoHo News and other publications. After receiving her MFA from Tisch School of the Arts (Grad Acting), Jennifer performed at the O'Neill Theater Center's Playwrights Conference, Long Wharf Theater, American Place Theatre and LaMamma, where she worked with renown Japanese director, Shuji Terayama. She subsequently joined Terayama's theater company in Tokyo, where she also acted in films. Her journalism career began when she was asked to write about Terayama for The Drama Review. She became a regular contributor to the Christian Science Monitor after writing an article about Marketta Kimbrell's Theater For The Forgotten, with which she was performing at the time. She was an O'Neill Theater Center National Critics' Institute Fellow, and then became the institute's Coordinator. While teaching at the Universities of Wisconsin and Rhode Island, she wrote "A Directory of Festivals of Theater, Dance and Folklore Around the World," published by the International Theater Institute. Denmark's Odin Teatret's director, Eugenio Barba, wrote his manifesto in the form of a letter to "Dear Jennifer Merin," which has been published around the world, in languages as diverse as Farsi and Romanian. Jennifer's culturally-oriented travel column began in the LA Times in 1984, then moved to The Associated Press, LA Times Syndicate, Tribune Media, Creators Syndicate and Arcamax Publishing. She's been news writer/editor for ABC Radio Networks, on-air reporter for NBC, CBS Radio and for Westwood One's America In the Morning. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association in the Film, Documentary and TV branches and a voting member of the Black Reel Awards. For her AWFJ archive, type "Jennifer Merin" in the Search Box (upper right corner of screen).