Finishing Up the Festival

You're probably about ready for us to stop talking about the Philadelphia Film Festival now, and indeed that trolley has pretty much pulled out of town, but we thought we'd throw in just one more post, this time discussing the festival's final statistics and awards. You can find the complete list of award-winners on the festival home page, and detailed audience ballot results here. The stats suggest that the festival was more crowd-pleasing than ever this year, as it had a record-breaking attendance level of 66,300, and 52% of the films received audience ratings of "Very Good" or better.

Now onto the prizes! The festival gives out a series of Jury Prizes and Audience Awards. Of course the Phillyist writers, despite all our work getting out to as many films as we could, saw neither the jury's Best Feature Film winner (Off Screen), nor the audience's (Elsa & Fred). We didn't see any of the top five highest rated films, either. In fact, we saw only one each of the Jury Prize winners (Wristcutters: A Love Story, which won for Best First Film) and the Audience Award winners (The Descent, for best Danger After Dark film). Well, at least we agree with both of those decisions! (This Phillyist writer is particularly happy Wristcutters, possibly his favorite film of the festival, went home with an award, even if it wasn't the top prize.)

Local documentary film The Camden 28 was the big winner of the fest. It got the best overall audience ratings, the second highest ticket sales (somehow the awful The 4th Dimension beat it out), and was the first movie ever to win both the jury and audience awards for its category.

The Philadelphia CityPaper Festival of Independents is actually a part of the Philadelphia Film Festival, but they give out their own awards. Again, Phillyist writers managed to miss most of the winners, but we don't feel all that bad about it this time, because the two we did see (documentary Shame of a City for Best Feature-length Film, and The 4th Dimension for the NFL Technical Achievement Award) were two of our least favorite films in the festival.

And there you have it. Another festival done, tallied up, and put to bed. Hope you enjoyed it. We sure did.

Image Credit: Peter Ehrlich, via World.NYCSubway.org