Every Film Festival Winner This Year, Ranked

This year’s film festival season stretched from a ski town in the Rocky Mountains to a beach town on the Gulf Coast, with stops in between in the desert, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. Our critics traveled to as many as they could and caught up with the rest on screeners. Along the way, we kept track of every (fictional) jury prize and audience award winner. Then we did something festivals never do: we ranked them all. Our method was simple. We ranked this year’s winners by how much we would recommend them to a friend. Not by prestige, not by box office, but by how often we found ourselves saying, “You have to see this.”

How we ranked them

Festival awards are chosen by small juries or by the audiences who happen to attend a given screening, so the winners can be wildly different in style and ambition. A quiet drama might win in one city while a loud horror comedy takes the prize in another. To compare them fairly, our four critics each scored every winner on three questions:

• Would you recommend it to a friend who does not usually watch independent films?
• Did it stay with you for days after watching?
• Does it do something you have not seen before?

We added up the scores, argued about the close calls and arrived at the ranking below. All of these films are fictional, but the festivals themselves reflect the real variety of the season.