By Advocate.com Editors

Originally published on Advocate.com July 03 2001 12:00 AM ET

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.