The winners of the 30th Annual Atlanta Film Festival, the South’s premier experience for movie lovers, independent filmmakers and fans have been announced. The nine-day festival, which ran from June 9-17, drew approximately 27,000 people to screenings, panels and parties at its Downtown and Midtown Atlanta venues.

"We are very proud of the overwhelming success of the 2006 Atlanta Film Festival," said Jake Jacobson, the Festival’s director. “Our diverse schedule of over 150 films was designed to appeal to every kind of audience, and it paid off—we posted a record box office take, and quite a few screenings sold out during the week. Our specialized programming was also a hit as we had huge turnouts for actress Ruby Dee at the screening of the film No. 2 and CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta at the screening of the documentary Genius. I intend on building on this terrific beginning for my tenure here and promise a much bigger and even better Festival in 2007.”

The 30th Annual Festival concluded with the Atlanta Film Festival Awards Ceremony and the closing night screening of the film, the little Death. Two panels of judges determined most of the Festival’s award winners, and audience votes determined the three audience awards. The documentary judges included the High Museum of Art’s Curator of Media Arts, Linda Dubler, writer and producer Joe Fab and Scott Thigpen, director of media production for the humanitarian organization, CARE. The narrative judges included A.P. Gonzalez, director of UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, Sam Kelley, a professor of communication studies and African-American studies at the State University of New York College at Cortland, and assistant director JD Taylor. The winners of the 2006 Atlanta Film Festival are:



Audience Award, Best Documentary Film: The Trials of Darryl Hunt

Audience Award, Best Narrative Film: Quinceañera

Audience Award, Best Short Film: SPIN

Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary Film: What Remains

Grand Jury Prize, Best Narrative Film: Pope Dreams

Best Animated Film: The Wraith of Cobble Hill

Best Documentary Short: Closing Time

Best Narrative Short for Academy Award consideration: A Supermarket Love Song

Best Actor: (tie) John Maxwell (Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?)

Chris Butler (the little Death)



Best Actress: Ruby Dee (No. 2)

Southeastern Media Award: Keesha’s House, a narrative feature by David Collins (Producer), Dee Wagner (Screenwriter) and Steve Coulter (Director, Screenwriter)


Magnolia Teen Filmmaker Award: To Serve, a documentary short by Michael Thomas (Reel Works in Brooklyn, N.Y.)

Women in Film Award: Anne Makepeace, director of Rain in a Dry Land

The finalists for the Festival’s Perfect Pitch competition included Patrick Franklin and Andy Rusk for Plaster Man, Mary Branson for The Best Town on