Full Frame Presents 2025 Award Winners

Brittany Shyne’s “Seeds” wins Full Frame Grand Jury Award

DURHAM, N.C. –  Nine awards for a combined value of $45,000 in cash prizes are announced for the 2025 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Full Frame is a qualifying event for nominations for the Academy Award® Documentary Short Film category and the Producers Guild of America Awards.   

“We are proud to celebrate the 2025 award-winning films,” said Sadie Tillery, Full Frame Festival Co-Director and Artistic Director. “We are grateful to the award presenters for their support and especially wish to thank the jurors who joined us in reviewing the films this year.”  

The Full Frame Grand Jury Award is presented to Seeds directed by Brittany Shyne. Seeds is a portrait of Centennial farmers in the geographical south. Using lyrical black-and-white imagery, this meditative film examines the decline of generational Black farmers and the significance of owning land. 

Jessica Edwards, Leah Smith, and Brett Story participated on the jury for the Full Frame Grand Jury Award. 

A statement from the Full Frame Grand Jury Award participants reads, “A quietly affectionate portal into the everyday joys and challenges of multiple generations in the American South, this patiently observed film offers an exquisitely photographed celebration of a community historically overlooked in American mythology. We are pleased to award Seeds the 2025 Full Frame Grand Jury Prize for this loving portrait of Black farmers.” 

The Full Frame Grand Jury presented a Special Jury Award to The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir.  

The Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short is presented to perfectly a strangeness directed by Alison McAlpine. The award is presented by Drs. Barbra and Andrew Rothschild. The jurors were Aylin Gökmen, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Lisa Mazzotta.  

The 2025 Iris Tillman Hill Audience Award was presented to Come See Me in the Good Light, directed by Ryan White in the Feature category, and The Devil Is Busy, directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir, in the Short category. The Iris Tillman Hill Audience Awards are presented by Peter Lange in honor of Iris Tillman Hill.  

Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), of which Full Frame is a program, considers all films in competition for its Filmmaker Award and awards its 2025 prize to Coexistence, My Ass! directed by Amber Fares. Representatives of CDS juried the prize: Randolph Benson, Harlan Campbell, Gi Chun, Deborah Jakubs, Frances Howorth, Jamal Michel, Andie Turner, Timothy Tyson, and Hareth Yousef. 

The Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award honors a first-time documentary feature director. The 2025 award is presented to Marie-Magdalena Kochová for The Other One. The award is presented by the Charles E. Guggenheim Family. Akosua Adoma Owusu, Diane Quon, and Emily Rothschild participated in the jury. 

The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Award, which is given to a short film that highlights documentary as a formally inventive artistic medium, is presented to Mama Micra, directed by Rebecca Blöcher. The jury presented an honorable mention to two other films, perfectly a strangeness, directed by Alison McAlpine, and The Other Side of the Mountain, directed by Yumeng He. The award is presented by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and was juried by representatives for the institute: Eric Barstow, Margaret Lou Brown, Franklin Cason, Joshua Gibson, Shambhavi Kaul, and Ranjana Khanna. 

Representatives on behalf of the President’s Office of Duke University juried the prize for the Full Frame President’s Award, given to the best student film. This year’s award is given to The Spectacle, directed by Yasmin van Dorp. 

Speak., directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman, received the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights. Presented by the Julian Price Family Foundation in memory of Melanie Taylor, the award is given to a film that addresses a significant human rights issue in the United States. Representatives from the Kathleen Bryan Edwards family juried the prize: Anne Arwood, Laura Edwards, Clay Farland, Margaret Griffin, and Pricey Harrison. 

For more information on the award winners and complete juror statements, please visit fullframefest.org. 

The 27th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival runs through Sunday,  April 6. Tickets are on sale at fullframefest.org. 

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