YFEN Film Contest

About the Contest  |  2009 Film Contest Winners  |  2009 Judges

Announcing the 2009 Film Contest Winners!

First Place:
Jordan Allen, 18, California: "Freedom Thieves"

Second Place:
Stephen Small, 18, and Tom Piasny, 18, Illinois: "Silenced"

Third Place:
Aaron Dunbar, 18, Ohio: "Rumors"

Honorable Mention:
Amy Obarski, 19, Tennessee: "Petty Inquiries"

We congratulate all our applicants for their hard work and excellent ideas!  The top three winners win a free trip to NYC to attend our awards screening in the spring!  They will also be awarded cash prizes ($1000, $500, $250), and the first place winner will receive a $5000 partial scholarship to the New York Film Academy for a one week digital filmmaking workshop. *photo still from 2009 YFEN semi-finalist Ashley Mills' "Freedom"

Stay tuned for more information about our Youth Voices Uncensored event at the New York Film Academy on March 27th at 1:00PM where we will award our winners and announce next year's contest!

Announcing the 2009 Film Contest judges!

Kahlil Almustafa is known as the People’s Poet, whether for a mass rally of hundreds of people, a nightclub, church, university or a backyard family reunion. almustafa is the 2002 Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion and the author of four book of poetry and his debut CD CounterIntelligence. His collection of 15 years of poetry, Growing Up Hip-Hop, is used in classrooms from the elementary to the university level. almustafa recently completed the “100 Poems For 100 Days” project where he wrote 100 poems in the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency soon to be published in a collection of poems entitled, From Auction Block to Oval Office.

Kathy Brew is an award-winning independent video maker whose experience spans independent documentaries to experimental work and public television productions. For the past twelve years, she has been collaborating with filmmaker Roberto Guerra, working on a range of independent cultural and social issue video projects. She is also a curator/programmer, having most recently served as Co-Director of the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival (2004-2007) and Series/Curatorial Consultant for WNET’s independent series, REEL NEW YORK (2002-2004).  She is currently a Curatorial Consultant for REFRAME, the Tribeca Film Institute’s new online distribution opportunity for independent filmmakers and is on the faculty in the MFA Computer Arts department at the School of Visual Arts.

Shelbi Kepler, 18 years old, graduated from Temecula Valley High School and plans to attend the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts as a Film-Television Production major in the fall of 2009. She began her passion for visual arts with photography, then progressed into film last year. Currently she is part-time working as a video editor at Broadcast Architecture. Last fall she placed second in the NCAC's video competition and she is now very excited to be asked to help judge.

Shelby Knox is nationally known as the subject of the Sundance award-winning film, The Education of Shelby Knox, a 2005 documentary chronicling her teenage activism for comprehensive sex education and gay rights in her Southern Baptist community.

After the film’s release, Shelby became a national advocate for comprehensive sex education, testifying before city councils, state legislatures and the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives about the failure of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. She has appeared on Today, the Daily Show, Hardball, and sat down with both Dr. Phil  and Al Franken to discuss sex education and her varying states of virginity. She continues to travel the country as an itinerant feminist organizer, doing trainings, workshops and civil disobedience in the name of reproductive justice and sexual health. Shelby lives in New York City, where she spends her days in café’s trying to finish a book on the next generation of feminist activism.

Emily Kunstler graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Video in 2000. Emily worked as a video producer for Democracy Now!, an independent national television and radio news program that broadcasts on the Pacifica Radio Network and on public access and satellite television. She was a studio art fellow with the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. Emily was an associate producer on Alison Maclean’s "Persons of Interest" (Sundance, 2004). At Off Center Media, Emily has produced, directed and edited a number of short documentaries, including "Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War" (2003), which won Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock Film Festival, and was instrumental in winning exoneration for 35 wrongfully-convicted people, and "Getting Through to the President" (2004), which has aired on the Sundance Channel, Current TV, and Channel Thirteen/WNET.

Sarah Kunstler graduated from Yale University with a BA in Photography in 1998 and from Columbia Law School with a JD in 2004. She is currently a criminal defense attorney practicing in the Southern District of New York. Along with Emily, she is a co-founder of Off Center Media and has produced and directed a number of short documentaries, including "Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War" (2003), and "Getting Through to the President" (2004). "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe" is the sisters’ first documentary feature.

Mark Heyman was born and raised in New Mexico, and graduated from Brown University in 2002.  After attending NYU's graduate film program, he began working as the director of development for Protozoa Pictures, the production company of filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (PI,  REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE FOUNTAIN).   He was a co-producer on THE  WRESTLER, starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood.  The film, which was released by Fox Searchlight in 2008, won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival and has garnered numerous award nominations and wins, including two Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes, and three Independent Spirit Awards.

Julia Morgan, a native New Yorker, graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in Film and Dramatic Arts. She is an Associate Producer at Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes’ award-winning Louverture Films, which develops and produces independently financed feature and documentary films such as the Oscar® nominated TROUBLE THE WATER, and the upcoming Oscar® shortlisted music documentary SOUNDTRACK FOR A REVOLUTION. Prior to joining Louverture Films, Julia worked extensively in film and television production in various capacities including Assistant Director and Production Coordinator. She has worked with industry veterans on everything from low-budget films such as JUICE to big budget studio features such as MEN IN BLACK. A member of the Directors Guild of America, Julia serves on the Ethnic Diversity Steering Committee. She is a co-producer on the feature film MOOZ-LUM which recently completed shooting in Michigan.

Michael Young, New York Film Academy Provost.  BA, Harvard University, magna cum laude; MFA, NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. Student Academy Award finalist. Award-winning film McJew screened at festivals internationally, including Oberhausen, Cinema Du Reel, Clermont-Ferrand, Tel-Aviv, Ann Arbor, et al. NEA grant. Scorsese post-production award. Founding faculty of NYFA.

About the Contest

FreeSpeech in School (Does it Exist?)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the famous Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines when the court ruled in favor of students who had been suspended for protesting the Vietnam War. The Tinker case stated that students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But 40 years later, students are still facing challenges to their free speech and expression in school.

Each year NCAC challenges young people all across the nation to think about their First Amendment rights and the issue of Free Speech.  According to the Knight Foundation, “Nearly three-fourths of high school students either do not know how they feel about the First Amendment or admit they take it for granted and more than a third think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.”

The YFEN film contest offers young people an opportunity to think critically and creatively about these issues. Winning films are made available on our website and are used in workshops as part of a larger effort to foster youth voices and to educate the public about young peoples' rights.