COVEN Film Festival Award Winners

In only its second year, COVEN Film Festival has burst onto the San Francisco film scene, packing a bounty of women-helmed films into a single weekend. This year the festival took up residence in the city’s crown jewel of independent cinema, The Roxie, and brought the programming to match the storied theater. But there can only be so many winners, and this year’s were…

Best Feature Film: Once Upon a River (dir. Haroula Rose)

Haroula Rose‘s feature debut is a film where bad things happen and they happen quickly. The feeling of dread and impending calamity permeates throughout the opening, but rather than dwelling on trauma, Once Upon a River is more concerned with overcoming it through self-discovery. Rose utilizes a format more commonly used in the service of comedy, the road movie, to craft a coming-of-age drama tinged with pathos and with roots in the indigenous community.

After not-so-great things happen, Margo Crane (Kenadi DelaCerna) sets out for the first time on her own along Canada’s Stark River to seek out her estranged mother. Throughout her journey, Crane demonstrates remarkable self-reliance gained from time spent with her father (Tatanka Means), presenting a steely contrast with her tumultuous inner life.

The film’s success really rests on the shoulders of its lead performance, which hits just the right notes of understatement, growth, and affability. With the camera tightly trained on her for most of the film, the audience is left no choice but to find themselves in Margo, so with a less-skilled actor the whole movie could very well fall apart. Thankfully, DelaCerna is there to carry us through so that we may hold Margo’s hand as she holds it back.

Best Short Film: Made Public (dir. Foster Wilson)

When Dave (Josh Zuckerman) posts a shortsighted Facebook poll on the eve of his wedding, his fiancé Sydney (Jeanine Mason), and pretty much everyone she knows, smashes that mad react. If you can get on board with its kooky premise, Made Public serves as a bottle rom-com that sends up matrimonial anxieties in the digital age. Though some might cite the film’s tightly choreographed long-take as its highlight, for me it was a post-credit scene featuring Stephen Peck, another actor whose future work I’m looking forward to seeing.

Audience Award: Accept the Call (dir. Eunice Lau)

I was elated to learn that the audience award went to my personal favorite of the festival. Lau‘s debut feature documents the fallout resulting from a son and brother getting caught up in a patriot act dragnet. Though the details of the case are certainly compelling, Accept the Call is more interested in the internal narrative of its lead, Yusuf Abdurahman.

Yusuf‘s daughter Ikraan is continuously trying to enlighten her father about the societal factors that would cause an American Muslim youth like her brother Zacharia to be drawn to the prospects of ISIS recruitment. But Yusuf can’t seem to accept that rationale, instead rallying against Wahhabi-ism and its influence in Minnesota’s Muslim community.

This is one of the few docs outside of the works of Errol Morris where recreation is used to thematic achievement, as Yusuf attempts to wrap his head around the circumstances of his son’s radicalization. He’s not exactly a viewer surrogate as he has all the context of raising his children up until Zacharia’s arrest, but it’s through him that Lau reveals the facts of the case. As the events depicted int he film are ongoing, some directors might have struggled to settle on a natural conclusion, but the emotional climax the film offers is quietly stunning, and one of my favorite endings in recent memory.

Find out more about COVEN Film Festival here.