screenplay winners

MICRO-BUSiness
By John Bull & Louis Wolfe
- In the summer of 1969, Jack’s life and family department store was shutdown, which forced him to get a job to work for his college tuition. After getting a job at a local record store, he meets a hippie drug dealer where they devise a drug dealing/party business around Jack’s Micro-Bus.

Land of Lincoln
By Teresa Allison
- A group of specialized thieves of different ages and races, including an escaped con and a psychopath, are assembled by a mysterious boss for a heist and pass the time in a safe house outside Chicago.

Buried on Page 8
By Jennifer Harrison
- When Dave writes an obituary about the wrong man, Dave simply murders the man he wrote about. Getting the big story is a real killer.

Indie
By Thom Wilder
- A Chicago filmmaker making an independent movie with a lesbian actress finds himself in for more than he bargained for when a trip to meet her small-town family for Thanksgiving results in a one-night stand that changes their lives forever.

What We Inherit
By Lisa Miller
- A young woman's search for her biological father leads her to a small town where people disappear with no explanation.

Ryan’s Life
By Ruben Figueres
- Ryan is a happily married man with a great life. As time passes in his family life, he is about to discover the challenges of monogamy. His environment (work, friends, etc.) will play an important role in his decisions.

Policy King
By Lincoln Lee & Candice Crews
- Between 1916 and 1920 over 50,000 blacks poured into Chicago from the south to fill the need for labor. The blacks settled in concentrated areas on the Southside and Westside. It was like a city with in a city. A handful of blacks introduced policy gambling to the community. It took off, making the introducers and their successors very wealthy men. Some called them Racketeers, Gangsters, or Policy Kings.

The Ellen & Ted Show
By Gary & Beth Hoover
- A struggling fringe theater actress bluffs her way onto a reality show and soon finds herself cast as the lead in one of the biggest scams in television history.

Wild Dog County
By Jessica Edith Sinyard
- Detective Bill Harper discovers that his brother is involved in a gang that is destroying the region's dams. A taut, unsettling thriller set against the backdrop of the Franklin Dam protests in 1980s Australia with dark undertones of myth, menace, and machismo.

Eke ‘Bolos
By Stephen C. Settle
- Greece, 1974: In the waning days of the military junta, a battle-scarred veteran comes face to face with a terrorist plot to incite final war between the East and West.

Walrus Eating Baloney
By Benjamin Bates
- With almost no spoken communication, John, with Alzheimer’s, and two brothers who are deaf steal their way through the Arizona desert to get to Miami.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
By Ron Podell
- Hollywood's most powerful producer fights to keep his past from catching up to him while he shepherds a young director through a film shoot run amok in an effort to keep his studio from financially hemorrhaging.

Reborn
By Jon Lee Brody & David Sepulveda
- Marco D'Koh is a billionaire playboy who has it all except one thing; the truth. Marco battles with a gap in his memory. Soon his oblivious ties with the lineage put him and those he loves in danger. His help comes from a mysterious Nomad Protector and a single mom lawyer, who is battling her own demons. It is a fight to the very end both physically and spiritually. The only question is: Who is Marco D'Koh? Even Marco doesn't really know.

Felix the Flyer
By Christopher C. Canole
- A Cuban mailman who runs 1200 miles up the Mississippi River to battle the giants of the Marathon chasing him in the most bizarre race in Olympic history, filled with racism, cheating, and drug abuse to become an inspiration for all future underdogs who bite the big dogs.

God & Other Strangers
By Justine Cogan
- When a bad breakup sends her life into a tailspin, Maggie Holmes, a broken-hearted art teacher, returns home from San Francisco to the freezing Midwest to live with her mother, Carol, a smart, liberal feminist who is sure to take her side, offer a shoulder to cry on and even baby her a little. Maggie could use it. But while she has been off in California, Carol has changed. She's found God.


Congratulations again to this year’s winners for their incredible achievements in the art of screenwriting.

IIFF