The 2025 Montclair Film Festival has officially wrapped, and announced the winners of the audience and jury awards.
Jury award winners include Sirât, directed by Oliver Laxe, which was awarded the festival’s Fiction Feature Prize. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, directed by Kahlil Joseph, along with Seeds, directed by Brittany Shyne, shared the festival’s Bruce Sinofsky Award for the Documentary Feature Competition, the festival’s top documentary competition prize.
The jury judging the competition issued a statement on the sharing of the award, “We believe that sharing this award aligns with the spirit of these two films, which reject hierarchy and are infused with anarchic documentary filmmaking traditions. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Seeds push the form by treating the archives as a fugitive space and restoring faith in the image. In a time when the past is being violently contested, directors who approach its preservation with ingenuity and creativity deserve to be recognized equally.”
Audience Awards went to Sentimental Value directed by Joachim Trier for Fiction Feature and Come See Me In The Good Light directed by Ryan White for Documentary Feature.
“We are honored to have had the opportunity to share the work of these incredible artists at the Montclair Film Festival,” said Montclair Film Artistic Director Tom Hall.
He added, “We thank our amazing jurors for their passionate engagement with our program, congratulate our award winning filmmakers, and celebrate the work of every filmmaker in the festival, each of whom has made a critically important contribution to the art of film. We look forward to continuing to build community and connection throughout the year in our cinemas, supporting these films, and the work of filmmakers from around the world.”
The 2026 Montclair Film Festival will take place October 16-25, 2026.
Featured below are a list of all winners from the film festival:
Feature Film Jury Awards
Fiction Feature Prize Award
A Poet (dir. Simón Mesa Soto)
Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)
Winner – Sirât (dir. Oliver Laxe)
SOUND OF FALLING (dir. Mascha Schilinski)
TWO PROSECUTORS (dir. Sergei Loznitsa)
Bruce Sinofsky Award for the Documentary Feature Competition
Winner – BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (dir. Kahlil Joseph)
Cover-Up (dir. Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus)
Cutting Through Rocks (dir. Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni)
Love+War (dir. Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin)
Winner – Seeds (dir. Brittany Shyne)
Future/Now Competition Award
Blue Film (dir. Elliot Tuttle)
Fantasy Life (dir. Matthew Shear)
Winner – Mad Bills To Pay: (Or Destiny, Dile Que No Soy Malo) [dir. Joel Alfonso Vargas]
Omaha (dir. Cole Webley)
Rebuilding (dir. Max Walker-Silverman)
Mad Bills To Pay also won the Mark Urman Award For Fiction Filmmaking, yielding a $5000 prize. Omaha, while not winning the competition, received a Special Jury Prize for Performance by John Magaro.
Audience Awards
Audience Award for Fiction Feature
Recipient – Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)
Audience Award for Documentary Feature
Recipient – Come See Me In The Good Light (dir. Ryan White)
Audience Award for World Cinema
Recipient – It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)
Audience Award for Short Film
Recipient – All The Empty Rooms (dir. Joshua Seftel)
Short Film Jury Awards
Fiction Short Film Competition
Winner – The Sentry (dir. Jake Wachtel)
Documentary Short Film Competition
Winner – Oh Whale (dir. Winslow Crane-Murdoch)
Special Jury Prize recipient – THE LONG VALLEY (dir. Robert Machoian, Rodrigo Odeja-Beck)
New Jersey Shorts Competition
Winner – Standby (dir. Robert Gomes)
Junior Jury
Winner – Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Special Jury Prize for Debut Feature – My Father’s Shadow (dir. Akinola Davies Jr.)
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