Ann Tran, director of For Tomorrow, discusses with CGFF director Jeremy Fackenthal
The 22nd annual Common Good Film Festival has come to a close! From February 17-20, we showed a diverse array of ten feature films and five short films that took us from Korea to Israel to Canada and everywhere in between. In our first year hosting the festival at the Claremont Laemmle, CGFF is proud to have extended our film screenings to the wider Claremont community, and to host thought-provoking discussions after each.
As is our tradition, we gave out three different awards at this year’s festival. Two of these, the Whitehead Award for Best Feature Film and Best Short Film award, were voted on by a panel of jury members led by festival director Jeremy Fackenthal and assistant director Jim Fahey. Our third and final award is the Audience Award, which was counted by audience votes after each screening. We are excited to announce that Anthony Shim’s coming-of-age immigration drama Riceboy Sleeps is the recipient of both the Whitehead Award and the Audience Award!
We are also pleased to announce that this year’s award for Best Short Film goes to Joël Jent and Ali Al-Fatlawi’s Eating the Silence!
This year, CGFF had the pleasure of hosting two Q&As with feature film directors! An Tran, director the feature documentary For Tomorrow, was able to join us for a fascinating conversation about grassroots innovators from around the world, each of whom are dedicated to fighting some of today’s most pressing sustainability issues. We also had the pleasure of welcoming director Atin Mehra and three producers of the film Being Michelle to the stage for a conversation about the film’s concerns with deaf awareness, neurodiversity, and the need for communication in a starved world.
If you attended this year’s festival-thank you so much for coming! If you didn’t, we hope you’ll join us next year, where CGFF will return with more thought-provoking films and conversations about the Common Good!
Jim Fahey is an emerging film critic and curator who works as CGFF’s Assistant Director. He has spent the past year building his resumé at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed a Master’s program in Film, Exhibition & Curation. During that time he served as a film critic for The Student, the longest-running student newspaper in the UK, and also began Airplane Mode, a film-review blog currently available on Substack.
Jim Fahey is an emerging film critic and curator who works as the Assistant Director of the Common Good Film Festival. Born and raised in Bellevue, WA, Jim has a passionate interest in bringing challenging, high-quality cinema to the world, and aims to bring his knowledge and expertise to this year’s Common Good Film Festival. He has spent the past year building his resumé at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed a Master’s program in Film, Exhibition & Curation. During that time he served as a film critic for The Student, the longest-running student newspaper in the UK. He actively writes criticism at Airplane Mode, a film-review newsletter currently available for free on Substack.