History of CIF&AF
Meltdowns, Ohio
Best Music Video
A sprawling music video tribute to the many oddities of Ohio, featuring robots, pickles, and the Mothman on drums.
THE STORM
Best Animated Feature
Daguzi, a poor young man, finds a child named Bao drifting on the shore and decides to adopt him. To give Bao a better future, he takes him to the Bay of the Great Dragon to search for the treasures of a mysterious black ship. However, Daguzi is captured by the ship's monster, who begins to turn him into a monster. Bao desperately tries to save his father. Meanwhile, the legends and ghost stories of the bay emerge, revealing many adventures, some of them particularly disturbing.
Human Movie
Best AI
Human Movie is a media essay that uses glitched, deliberately "noisy" generated video and audio to explore the definition of being human through contrasts with and comparisons to Actually Indians systems. Centering static as both an aspect of generative AI infrastructures and as a metaphor for confusion and uncertainty, the film provides a space where borders and definitions are deliberately fuzzy. Nonetheless, the film proposes that noise can be truly generative if humans cultivate creativity and embrace complexity rather than surrender to machines.
The Sacred Society
Best Animated Short
In the end, our bodies are as fragile and ephemeral as paintings made of sand. Who will care for them when our time is over?
There is a group of volunteers in Jewish tradition who clean and prepare and dress the dead. THE SACRED SOCIETY is about these men, why they choose this work, and how it changes them. Illustrated with flowing, haunting sand animation, this documentary explores the importance of sacred ritual in helping us find meaning in our brief lives.
Moses
Best Documentry
In San Francisco, a man enduring homelessness for two decades connects with passersby to be seen among the invisible—a skill he learned from a promising music career cut short in the '70s, and one that will ultimately transform his life.
The Eye of Cleveland
Best Documentry Short
The Eye of Cleveland is both a short documentary film about photographer Herb Ascherman and an ode to his hometown. Herb has made more than 9,000 portraits over the past 40 years. Herb's portraits are in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art as well as in the book Fanfare, Portraits of the Cleveland Orchestra.
STALKER JANE
Best Ohio Narrative
Jane, a bonafide stalker, becomes involved with her band crush Demetri, a budding rock star, for whom she does terrible things to ensure his rise to stardom.
Lightning Over the Beyond
Best Narrative
Hikari is born blind and spends his early childhood imagining the sky and the color blue. At age ten, he undergoes an operation and sees for the first time. Alas, his vision lacks color and he must still imagine the color blue. As he grows, he develops an obsession with the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war. Led by the iconic photographs of Shomei Tomatsu, Hikari sets off on a pilgrimage to understand the nature of war and the effects of war on human beings. Along the way, he meets Tomobe, who is a mentor and maybe more, and he comes face to face with the legacy of radiation and violence that still lingers in Japan. As global warming intensifies and as the world again dissolves into chaos and conflict, we encounter Hikari as a seventy-year-old man. With his partner, he lives high in the mountains where they seek out a modest living. The world seems condemned to destruction but, just then, Hikari's vision gains color. For the first time, he can see the blue of the sky, and, for the first time, he understands just how beautiful the world has always been.
textpop
Best experemental
extpop is an experimental short that explores visible language, neurodivergence, and constructed meaning, through an innovative blend of color, imagery, and typography—texts, phrases, direct messages, fragments, lists. The animation, shifting every 2-5 seconds, mirrors our contemporary attention spans influenced by technology. The film invites viewers to experience text as a material, reflecting on information construction, retention, and delivery. It is a fractured poem, which meditates on grief, perception, and meaning, created without storyboarding or previsualization. Each scene developed in a continuous, unedited flow borrowing from the process of direct filmmaking and cameraless animation. Textpop investigates the interplay between digital animation, motion design, and traditional experimental practices.
The Chronocular Device
Best Ohio Short
A shadowy figure, upon breaking into an abandoned home, finds a strange device which allows him a glimpse into the home's past.
Experts In A Dying Field
Best Student Short