Joshua Meribole—Staff Writer

The 2019 Prairie Grass Film Challenge Awards Ceremony took place on February 22, showcasing short films from teams around the country competing for the Best of High School, Best of College and Best of Post-College categories.

This year, the participating teams had to incorporate a prop, a character, a line of dialogue and a genre from a provided list into their short films.

Although former Dordt alumni won in their category, no team currently attending Dordt College won did. The Dordt-based team Obscure Studios did manage to be the runner-up for the Best of College category with their film Shades of Conscience.

Photo by Joshua Meribole

The Best of College award went to Kalta Studios from South Dakota University with the film Rift. Kalta Studios was given the character prompt of a “writer,” which they interpreted as a coder. The coder in the short film writes code, attempting to create a Virtual Reality world. Throughout the film, it is hard to distinguish what is the virtual reality world and what is real. In the end, viewers are left to evaluate their lives in relationship to technology and their friends.

For the Best of High School, Movie Knight Productions from Unity Christian won with their film, Dream Come True. They also won the previous year in the same category.

Dream Come True tells the story of a boy who learns to lucid dream. In his lucid dreams, he feels that he can do anything that he would not do, or isn’t brave enough to do while he is awake. The way that he knows that he is lucid dreaming is with a cup of tea at his bedside, similar to the top in Inception.

The winners of the Best of Post-College award, Player 2 Productions, have won many awards over the years for their work in PGFC. Their Black Mirror inspired film, BROTHER, features a main character who is in not allowed to leave his house as he has been placed under house arrest. A robot called BOBB13 is assigned to monitor him, and he tries desperately to escape from it.

Ben Kuiper, Dordt alum and Team Leader of Player 2 Productions, says he felt the post-college competition was a lot more relaxed, as there were fewer people to compete with.

The winner of Best of Show went to team Mike, with the film All in the Details, which tells the story of a detective trying desperately to solve a murder case, who sees aspects of the case in the book he is reading.

Films can be viewed and voted on for the People’s Choice awards on the PGFC film website (pgfc.film).

PGFC is currently slated to run from January 16 – 18 next year, with the Awards Ceremony on the 21st of February.