Planet Out announces Short Movie Awards

PlanetOut.com has announced the winners in its online festival on GLBT short films. Two sets were announced, one selected by an audience vote collected from over half a million visitors to the site during the month of June, one chosen by a panel of judges including openly gay actor Wilson Cruz (My So-called Life), Sundance and Outfest programmer Shannon Kelly, and director Jamie Babbit (Popular, But I’m a Cheerleader). The panel chose to split the grand prize of $10,000 between Aaron Walker’s film Summer Light, a chilling account of a boy imprisoned in a junkyard, and Eva Saks’s documentary Family Values, which chronicles the life of a suburban lesbian couple who run a family business cleaning up death scenes. Other winners are the experimental film Casualty, shot entirely underwater by Emmy award–winning filmmaker Andy Abrahams Wilson; Hi, I’m Steve, Robert Kennedy’s comic short about telephone dating; the drama Broken Warning, a story about the hidden love between two members of a Latino gang by Tadeo Garcia; the eerie animated film Numb by Dino Alberto and Dave Hughes; and Kevin O’Keefe’s Destiny’s Children, a documentary about one man’s trials in adopting a child. Audience votes went to the comic instructional guide Color Me Gay, a primer for those just leaving the closet, by Eric Waddell and Jeffrey Wylie; the documentary by Efrat Tal about a gay police officer, No Backup; the experimental creation myth Lullaby by Antonia Kao; Jonathan Waldpis’s drama Lives of the Pharaohs; and the digital animation short by Mark Ewert and David Cutler about Japanese schoolgirls with a special bond, Piki and Poko: The Adventure Begins! The awards will be handed out at a special ceremony during the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Winners and runners-up can be viewed at http://movieawards.planetout.com.