it's a sweatshop
The Moth and the Firefly is awarded a Bronze Palm at the Mexico International Film Festival. Very exciting!
We were given this award because the jury “felt that your film demonstrated superior and standout filmmaking and is deserving of special recognition. Your film was among the best submitted from over 30 countries around the world.” This is really exciting!
All of the winners here.
MAY 1 – BEST SHORT FILM – AUDIENCE AWARD – TURIN, ITALY
Celebration won the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the 17th Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Turin hosts the largest and oldest gay and lesbian film festival in all of Europe. The Audience Award is the fourth prize won by Celebration, after the Teddy Award, Best Short in New York and the Kodak Vision Award.
APRIL 21 – BEST AMERICAN SHORT – NEW YORK/AVIGNON FILM FESTIVAL
Daniel Stedman won his second major award, The 21st Century Filmmaker Award for Best American Short at the Avignon/New York Film Festival. He was bestowed with prizes totaling $10,000 from Panavision, DuArt, LTV Laser Subtitling, The New York Observer, Cineric, The Tribeca Film Center, and Kodak. He also received the prestigious “Roger” statuette created by sculptor James Knowles to symbolize independence and creativity, and a Kodak Vision Award.
WELLESLEY FILMMAKER WINS A TEDDY AWARD
by MAUREEN DEZELL, GLOBE STAFF
February 22, 2002
Page: D4 Section: Living
Wellesley’s Daniel Stedman, 23, flew back to Logan late Tuesday from the Berlin Film Festival, where he won a Teddy, the prestigious festival’s award for gay- and lesbian-themed films. The youngest filmmaker invited to this year’s festival, Stedman garnered the honor for “Celebration,” a bittersweet four-minute movie about a coming-out ceremony for a 6-year-old boy.
The fledgling filmmaker, who graduated from Bates College in Maine with a degree in physics last spring, was thrilled about his win and by the hoopla that came with it. Known in Berlin as the “gay Oscar,” the Teddys are bestowed by German celebrities at “a real-deal awards ceremony” attended by 3,000 people, according to Stedman. Needless to say, it’s followed by a great big party. “Celebration” was screened at the 1,000-seat Zoo Palast theater, where many in the audience burst into laughter and applause when the 6-year-old celebrant, standing at a podium, utters one of the movie’s two lines: “I am a homosexual.” The viewers’ enthusiasm was particularly gratifying to Stedman. “There was a little controversy surrounding my film, because I’m actually straight. It’s just a film that poses a lot of questions,” says Stedman, who’s off tonight on a red-eye flight to California, where “Celebration” will be screened at Cinequest in San Jose.
He’s been invited to “a whole slew of other festivals” but is likely to skip many of them. He and a friend, producer Thomas Haydn, have just formed Dezember Productions, and are gearing up to make a feature film about township jazz, a Harlem Renaissance-like genre centered in Sophiatown in the 1960s, in apartheid-era Africa.
FEBRUARY 17- TEDDY AWARD – BERLIN 2002 – BEST SHORT FILM
Daniel Stedman won the coveted Teddy Award at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival. The Teddy Award goes to the best short, documentary, and feature films with a gay or lesbian subject matter. The awards were broadcast live from the 3,000 seat Tempodrome in Berlin.
Before the awards were bestowed, Celebration screened with “Food of Love” to an audience of over 1,000 at the Zoo Palast cinema. The screening went so well that Celebration will be distributed together with Food of Love to certain territories. Already, Denmark has agreed to distribute the films together as a package.
