Winners announced for Student Academy Awards®

Jun 10, 2002 by Ian Evans

Eleven film students from eight U.S. universities were honored on June 9th as winners in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 29th Annual Student Academy Awards competition. The winners participated in several days of industry-related activities and social events prior to the awards presentation ceremony at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater. A film student from Denmark also was honored by the Academy, receiving this year’s Honorary Foreign Film Award.

Following are this year’s winners (alphabetical by film title within category):

Alternative Category

  • Gold Medal: For Our Man, Kazuo Ohno, Columbia University, New York
  • Silver Medal: Island to Island, Soopum Sohn, New York University
Animation Category
  • Gold Medal: Passing Moments, Don Phillips Jr., Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida
  • Silver Medal: The Velvet Tigress, Jen Sachs, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
  • Bronze Medal: Shadowplay, Dan Blank, New York University
Documentary Category
  • Gold Medal: Moving House, Pin Pin Tan, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
  • Silver Medal: Family Values, Eva Saks, New York University
  • Bronze Medal: Revolutions Per Minute, Thomas Burns, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
Narrative Category
  • Gold Medal: The Wormhole, Jessica Sharzer, New York University
  • Silver Medal: Barrier Device, Grace Lee, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Bronze Medal: Sophie, Helen Haeyoung Lee, University of Texas at Austin
Honorary Foreign Film
  • Feeding Desire, Martin Strange-Hansen, National Film School of Denmark in Copenhagen
While the U.S.-based students knew they would each receive an award, the level of that award – gold, silver or bronze – was not revealed until the ceremony. Besides trophies, gold medal winners receive $5,000; silver medal winners are awarded $3,000 and bronze medal winners take home $2,000.

Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Freida Lee Mock presented the awards in the documentary category; Oscar®-nominated screenwriter Alexander Payne presented the Honorary Foreign Film Award and the medals in the alternative category and Actors Branch member Michael McKean served as presenter for the narrative and animation categories.

These students first competed in one of three regional competitions. Each region was permitted to send the Academy as many as three films in each of the four categories. The finalist films were then screened and voted on by Academy members to select the winners.

The Honorary Foreign Film winner, who received a $1,000 cash grant, was selected from a pool of 33 entries from 23 countries. This is the third time a student from the National Film School of Denmark has won this award. Reza Parsa won in 1996 for his film Never, and in 1983, Ingrid Oustrup Jensen received the award for her film Over My Dead Body.

The Student Academy Awards were established by the Academy in 1972 to support and encourage excellence in filmmaking at the collegiate level.