Sixteen students representing 12 films were announced August 5 as winners of the 53rd Student Academy Awards®. This year, the Student Academy Awards competition received 2,972 entries from 894 colleges and universities worldwide. The four categories were Documentary, Alternative/Experimental, Narrative and Animation.
Awards will be presented September 14 at TIFF 2026, where the final gold, silver and bronze placements, valued at $5000, $3000 and $2000 respectively, will be announced.
Of the 12 winning films, six were documentaries, presented within the Documentary and Alternative/Experimental categories. Three of these were made by European filmmakers.
DOCUMENTARY SECTION WINNERS
- Jason Elliott for I Want to Live (National Film and Television School, United Kingdom). Synopsis: The voice of science and lived experience come together in this explorative, raw documentary, uncovering years of personal diary entries and archive footage of a strong young woman, Mallory Smith, navigating an equally strong illness: AMR – Antimicrobial Resistance.
- Arjun Fischer for Artificial Love (University of Southern California, United States). Synopsis: After a lifetime of failed relationships a man finds an unexpected romance in ChatGPT, leading to an unconventional marriage that challenges the boundaries of love and what it means to be human.
- Lara Dihmis for The Last People of Petra (New York University, United States). Synopsis: Displaced to make way for tourism in Petra decades ago, the Bdoul tribe lives between the village they were moved to and the site they never fully left.
DOC WINNERS IN ALTERNATIVE/EXPERIMENTAL CATEGORY
- Viktorie Štěpánová for Volklore (FAMU, Czech Republic). Synopsis: An experimental video essay exploring how Czech folklore transforms in the digital age of social networks. Traditions become tools for marketing; you become a brand, your followers a community. YouTuber Vivi guides us through folk customs linking them to key fashion events. But is there authenticity in the age of platform capitalism?
- Nina Broers for Where Is My Sex Drive? (St. Joost School of Art & Design, Netherlands). Synopsis: The film follows a young woman who struggles with her broken sexual health and deploys two actors to play out scenes from her past to investigate where and how it went wrong. Whilst filming she is continually confronted with opposing opinions.
- Lei He for Drifting (Duke University, United States). Synopsis: A miner and his sheep drift through the coal-mining landscapes of northern China. Blending observational documentary with poetic cinematic language, Drifting unfolds across three intertwined temporalities: geological time embedded in coal and mountains, bodily time shaped by labour and breath, and more-than-human time shared by humans, animals, and the landscape.
All Student Academy Award-winning films will be eligible to compete for the 99th Oscars® in the Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film or Documentary Short Film category. Past Student Academy Award winners have gone on to receive 70 Oscar® nominations and have won or shared 15 awards.
