Awards & Voting

Awards & Voting

The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is proud to present a suite of esteemed awards, recognising excellence in screen storytelling. These awards celebrate the creativity, innovation, and impact of filmmakers from around the world.

An invited Jury selects the best film in the AFF Feature Fiction, Feature Documentary, Change Award and Shorts Award competition categories, and all audience members are encouraged to vote for their favourite films in the AFF Audience Awards.

AFF Feature Fiction Award

In 2007, AFF became the first Australian film festival to recognise international accomplishment with the $10,000 AFF Feature Fiction award, which was complemented in 2013 with the addition of the juried Feature Documentary award. Our Competition Jury values idiosyncratic voices, bold storytelling, creative risk-taking and overall fabulous films.

Feature Fiction Films in Competition

Donkey Princess

Donkey Princess

Princess Diana inhabits a Technicolor storybook world of gauchos, puppets and painted sets, until a magical bracelet offers escape. As fantasy fractures and new realities emerge, this shape-shifting Chilean tale asks whether freedom can ever release us from the bonds of love and obligation.

Fruit Gathering

Fruit Gathering

A deep bond with unpredictable undercurrents forms between textile workers San Kyi and Theint Theint Oo. Is there a chance for something deeper between them or is the inexorable pull downwards inescapable in a Myanmar torn apart by brutal violence? Aung Phyoe’s heady drama dances between doom and desire.

Lovers in the Blue Night

Lovers in the Blue Night

Married through pity, Karim and Ameena eke out a passionless life in Mumbai. She clings to anonymous letters, while he’s quietly gay. When Karim finds desire in a thief named Sukka, and Ameena mistakes a pimp for her letter-writer, four lonely lives collide in longing, illusion and survival.

The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples

In 1974 South Africa, 11-year-old Marnus (Dawian van der Westhuizen) has known an idyllic childhood of family, friendship and summer holidays. When a missing fishing rod sets off a disturbing chain of events, he begins to recognise the violence and inequality his privileged world has allowed him not to see.

Tiber

Tiber

Thoughtful Marco feels the history of art deep in his soul. But when awful news sees him placed on leave from his lecturing gig in Rome, he jumps in a beat-up Fiat and heads to Tuscany to take his young daughter on an emotional journey along the Tiber River.

AFF Feature Documentary Award

The $10,000 AFF Documentary Award celebrates distinctive factual filmmaking. Our jury members look for the most original and distinctive documentary voices.

Feature Documentary Films in Competition

The Balkan Cowboy

The Balkan Cowboy

As a child, visual artist, academic and filmmaker Dragana Jurišić adored Westerns, both American and from the mysterious former-Yugoslavian have-a-go hero, Hari Džekson. But who was Hari really? Jurišić’s kookily charming, if occasionally chilling, Sarajevo Film Festival competition documentary attempts to fill in the blanks blurred by war crimes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Burn bright enough and you’ll be remembered forever, no matter how tragically short your life is cut. Such was the fate of game-changing artist Jean-Michel Basquiat – friend of Madonna, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol – who blazed an indelible trail before joining the infamous 27 Club. But when legend envelops your legacy, with Basquiat’s brilliantly bold works going for as much as US$110 million, the truth can get lost. Viridiana Lieberman and Quinn Whitney Wilson’s iridescent documentary sets the record straight.

The Way You See Me

The Way You See Me

Filmed across a decade, this evolving self-portrait captures gender transition from the inside out, tracing a radical transformation from hyperfemininity towards defiant masculinity while confronting the forces of class, privilege and patriarchy within Mexico’s conservative upper-middle-class society.

Wolf

Wolf

British avant-pop musician Patrick Wolf revisits the triumphs and traumas that shaped his life and music through a lifetime of archival material and a searching conversation with longtime friend Tilda Swinton. Delicate yet emotionally raw, Wolf exchanges mythmaking for vulnerability.

AFF Change Award

In 2020, AFF introduced the $5,000 AFF Change Award for positive social or environmental impact through cinema expressing a desire to live in new ways. The Change Award Jury celebrates the feature that best demonstrates these values.

Change Award Films in Competition

All Rivers Spill Their Stories To The Sea

All Rivers Spill Their Stories To The Sea

When thousands of poisoned crabs wash ashore on England's north-east coast, veteran fisherman Stan Rennie begins a search for answers. Jeanie Finlay's stirring documentary uncovers an environmental mystery intertwined with political change, economic hardship and the quiet dignity of a resilient community.

Humboldt USA

Humboldt USA

German polymath Alexander von Humboldt was welcomed by President Thomas Jefferson and his name is lent to places across the United States. So why does nobody know Humboldt or his radical musings on our interconnected world? G. Anthony Svatek’s astonishingly beautiful essay film will get you up to speed.

Time and Water

Time and Water

You’ll come to mourn the loss of a glacier every bit as much as a family member when you melt into Sara Dosa’s astonishing new film. As narrated by the Icelandic poet Andri Snær Magnason, who pours his family’s soul into it, it’s a spellbinding elegy for a fast-vanishing majesty.

Steal This Story, Please!

Steal This Story, Please!

Marvel as Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman reveals how she built the fiercely independent news program from a community radio-syndicated show run out of a broom closet into a globally watched TV broadcast without sacrificing her values and firm belief that the fourth estate should be a force for good.

The Way We Move

The Way We Move

A deaf person can feel music’s beat through their feet. Powerhouse Amber Galloway reckons the community deserves more. Join her bootcamp for ASL translators, teaching them to reveal the heart of a song beating between the lyrics, and the wordless highs and lows from classical music to EDM in this SXSW highlight.

AFF Shorts Award

The $3,000 AFF Short Film Award, judged by a well-respected jury, celebrates original, innovative short filmmaking.

Short Films in Competition

Baby Talk

Baby Talk

As her wedding to the father of her unborn child looms, Leo steals a precious day with best friend Amy to find a wedding dress on the final leg of a road trip home.

Hugs

Hugs

A cyclist witnesses two people in a tender embrace, and begins to view the world through a new lens.

Maŋutji

Maŋutji

Two young teens navigate their ever-growing draw toward one other, while maintaining cultural boundaries and kinship.

Morana

Morana

In a traditional Czech village, a nihilistic teenager is cursed to be delivered into the hands of Morana, the Pagan goddess of death.

Third Space

Third Space

A charming record of the end of summer and start of winter inside a North Perth Town Hall.

Wet Feathers

Wet Feathers

After developing a phobia of pigeons, the eccentric Brett Trueman escapes to the underground town of Coober Pedy where he recounts experiences from his life.

Audience Awards

The AFF Audience Awards are voted for by filmgoers, giving everyone who comes to the festival a chance to champion their favourite films. There are three Audience Awards, in categories for feature fiction, documentary and short film. All films in the festival are eligible.

The Don Dunstan Award

The Adelaide Film Festival Board proudly presents the Don Dunstan Award, recognising an exceptional individual who has made an outstanding contribution to Australian screen culture.

This year's Don Dunstan Award recipient is internationally acclaimed actor, writer and director Leah Purcell AM.

The Bettison & James Award

Administered by Adelaide Film Festival, this annual award provides $50,000 in recognition of an exemplary and inspiring lifelong contribution by an individual working in any field.

This year's award recipient is Karina Lester – Aboriginal Co-Manager and Senior Aboriginal Language Expert for the Mobile Language Team (MLT) at Adelaide University, supporting the Aboriginal languages of South Australia in revival and living languages programs. Karina is also an active anti-nuclear activist.