Best Drama
Best Feature Film
Best Director Feature Film
Along the Western shores of Lake Michigan, just north of Milwaukee, lies the small town of Port Washington, Wisconsin where two old fishermen recover the curious isolated remains of a human face.
Jaden Sobczak, a young man in his early 20’s of mixed African-American and Caucasian descent, has moved back in with his grandparents Ron and Liz Sobczak in Port Washington after becoming increasingly distanced from his mother Stacy, Ron and Liz’s daughter, whose struggles with drug addiction and unhealed trauma have left her bitter and unstable.
Having attended school in this small town, Jaden is all too familiar with a climate of racial ignorance ranging from a racial slur being written on his locker to ongoing encounters, including a young woman who works with him at a local restaurant who expresses romantic interest in him then clumsily points out that she likes that he is black but that he doesn’t “act” black, not understanding that Jaden finds this infuriating and insulting.