10/06/2013 - UK's National Film and Television School film school triumphs at the 40^th Student Academy Awards

The UK’s National Film and Television School triumphed at the 40^th Student Academy Awards held in Beverley Hills on June 8^th as Kristina Yee’s Miss Todd won the Gold Medal for Best Foreign Film. The annual ceremony celebrates the best films and most talented students from colleges and universities across the world with past recipients including Robert Zemeckis and Spike Lee.

The film by Yee (who is originally from the US but studies at the NFTS) is a stop-motion, musical animation about the first woman in the world to build and design airplanes and is the first animation to win the Best Foreign Film Award. It’s the second time that a film from the NFTS has won the Gold Medal at the Student Academy Awards – Estonian director Tanel Toom won in 2010 for The Confession, a film that went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Two other European Universities were represented for the first time in the Best Foreign Film category as films from University of the Arts in Switzerland and the RITS School of Arts, Erasmus University College Brussels in Belgium received Silver and Bronze medals respectively

The full list of winners is:

Alternative

Gold Medal: Bottled Up (Dir.  Rafael Cortina, Occidental College)

Silver Medal: Zug (Dir. Perry Janes, University of Michigan)

Bronze Medal: The Compositor (Dir. John Mattiuzzi, School of Visual Arts)

Animation

Gold Medal: Dia de los Muertos (Dir. Lindsey St. Pierre and Ashley Graham, Ringling College of Art and Design)

Silver Medal: Will (Dir. Eusong Lee, California Institute of the Arts)

Bronze Medal: Peck Pocketed (Dir. Kevin Herron, Ringling College of Art and Design

Documentary

Gold Medal: A Second Chance (Dir. David Aristizabal, University of Southern California)

Silver Medal: Every Tuesday: A Portrait of The New Yorker Cartoonists (Dir. Rachel Loube, School of Visual Arts)

Bronze Medal: Win or Lose (Dir. Daniel Koehler, Elon University)

Narrative

Gold Medal: Ol’ Daddy (Dir. Brian Schwarz, University of Texas at Austin)

Silver Medal: Josephine and the Roach (Dir. Jonathan Langager, University of Southern California)

Bronze Medal: Un Mundo para Raúl (A World for Raúl) (Dir. Mauro Mueller, Columbia University) 

Foreign Film

Gold Medal: Miss Todd (Dir. Kristina Yee, National Film and Television School, United Kingdom)

Silver Medal: Parvaneh (Dir. Talkhon Hamzavi, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)

Bronze Medal: Tweesprong (Crossroads) (Dir. Wouter Bouvijn, RITS School of Arts, Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium)