Last night the Canadian International Faith & Family Film Festival (CIFF) in Toronto declared Calf Rope as Best Short Film in the 4th annual event. According to the CIFF website, their mission is "to showcase, promote, educate, and encourage appreciation of faith, family and independent films. Every year at the CIFF Film Festival we exhibit and celebrate the most outstanding faith and family content produced... and champions new films that are suitable for entertaining and uplifting family audiences around the world." Due to COVID-19, the 4th annual Canadian International Faith & Family Film Festival had to be reinvented as a virtual experience (as nearly all other film festivals scheduled for 2020 have had to do) and was streamed from Friday, Sept 18th at 7 PM (ET) through Saturday, Sept.19th with the awards gala ceremony 8 - 9 PM.
Along with the win for Best Short Film, Calf Rope was also nominated for Best Director (Bradley Hawkins), Best Actor (10 yr-old Lukas Barnett), and Best Supporting Actor (Gorman Ruggiero).
This is the first time that a film festival reversed the nominations for Barnett and Ruggiero, which indicates to us that that the CIFFF chose to recognize and celebrate the unique child's POV of our coming-of-age family drama. Ruggiero was in an especially challenging category as Best Supporting Actor with fellow nominees for the award being included Oscar-winner, Jon Voight (Coming Home) and actor, Parker Bates (who plays young "Kevin" on the Emmy-winning series,This is Us. The award for Supporting Actor went to Cameron Arnett in the tremendous faith-based feature, Discarded Things.
For a complete list of the winners and nominees for CIFF 2020 visit the Awards Gala page of their website.
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