We are pleased to announce the 2018 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Comics, Documentary Film, and Narrative Film. The final awards will be announced and presented on March 30 at the AML Conference, held in Berkeley, California. We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include book blurbs and author biographies, adapted from the author and publisher websites.
Comics
The thrilling continuation of the YALSA award-winning comic. In a mythical Russia, a mysterious young boy is raised by an order of monks. As he grows to manhood, bizarre dreams and the call of destiny disturb the ideals of brotherhood and peace that define his idyllic home.
Brandon Dayton has worked in animation, illustration and concept art. He has created concept art for multiple titles for EA Games and for Disney Infinity. In 2009 he self published his first mini-comic, Green Monk which was selected for the YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens Booklist. In 2017 he was a contributor to Jim Henson’s Storyteller: Giants anthology. He creates comics and likes to talk about art and life on his youtube channel. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife, Annie and his two awesome children, Lucy and Grey.
Introvert. Big sister. Cartoonist. Months after Brittany Long Olsen returned from a year abroad in Japan, she was living at home, working a boring desk job, and being pressured to throw herself into the dating scene. An unexpected move to Utah led to grad school, roommates, some crazy adventures with her best friend, a lot of pizza, and all the ups and downs of being a young adult. All the while, she was drawing a comic journal page every day. Comic Diaries Volume 1 collects one year of her best slice-of-life cartoons about humor, family, faith, and love.
Brittany Long Olsen is a cartoonist and illustrator. In 2008, she decided to start making autobiographical comics every day as her own way of journal-keeping, and she hasn’t missed a day since. Her debut graphic novel, DENDO: One Year and One Half in Tokyo, won the 2015 AML Award in Comics. She has a piece in the 2018 collection Served: A Missionary Anthology. More of her daily journal comics can be found at comicdiaries.com where she posts cartoons about adventures with her husband and their dog named Jetpack.
An all-ages fantasy-adventure graphic novel. Wake only wants one thing: to save his mother. Her soul was tragically trapped in a power-crystal during a raid on their homestead. The only chance to save her is to find and unlock the power of the Star Seed. But Wake isn’t the only one who wants the Star Seed. There are dark forces rising who will stop at nothing to destroy it. Will Wake find it in time? Or will he face the same fate as his mother?
Jake Parker is an illustrator, animator, and children’s book author, who has worked on feature films such as Epic, Rio, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Horton Hears a Who! (all with Blue Sky Studios) and has published picture books and comic books such as The Little Snowplow, Rocket Raccoon, The Tooth Fairy Wars (an AML Award finalist), The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, and Little Bot and the Sparrow. He is also the founder of Inktober, a popular celebration of ink drawing that began in October 2009.
Cooties is an all-ages comic strip which follows a bunch of kids and their adventures dealing with school, friends, parents, the opposite sex, and the occasional paranormal/extraterrestrial catastrophe. In #11, a stand-alone story, Nate juggles cramming for a school project along with alien pet care.
Nick Perkins has been drawing and cartooning for most of his life, to the chagrin of many of his math teachers growing up. He first began publishing cartoons in college in Utah State University’s student newspaper, The Utah Statesman (Ag-gravation, 1998-2002). He also wrote and drew political cartoons for The Herald Journal in Logan, Utah (2002-2005) and the Davis County Clipper in Bountiful, Utah (2006-2009). His work has also been published in Sunstone Magazine, and his story “Creatures Great & Small” appears in the 2018 collection Served: A Missionary Anthology.
Noah Van Sciver is haunted by the house at 133 Maple Terrace, or as his brothers rechristened it “One Dirty Tree.” This sprawling dilapidated New Jersey house was his first home and the site of formative experiences. Growing up in a big, poor, Mormon family―surrounded by comic-books, eight siblings, bathtubs full of dirty dishes―Noah’s childhood exerts a powerful force on his present day relationship. Drawn in his inimitable style, written with wry wit and humor, One Dirty Tree is another reason why Noah Van Sciver is one of the best cartoonists of his generation.
Noah Van Sciver first came to national attention with his critically acclaimed comic book series Blammo, which has earned him three Ignatz award nominations. His work has appeared in Mad magazine, Best American Comics 2011, Spongebob comics, and The Stranger, as well as countless graphic anthologies. Van Sciver is the author of six graphic novels, including: The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, Youth Is Wasted, Saint Cole, and Fante Bukowski: Struggling Writer. He is currently working on a graphic novel about Joseph Smith. Van Sciver currently resides in Columbus, OH.Documentary Film
Imagine Dragons’ front man Dan Reynolds is taking on a new mission to explore how the Church treats its LGBTQ members. With the rising suicide rate amongst teens in the state of Utah, his concern with the Church’s policies sends him on an unexpected path for acceptance and change, including creating the Loveloud Festival.
Church & State is the improbable story of a brash, inexperienced gay activist and a tiny Salt Lake City law firm that joined forces to topple Utah’s gay marriage ban. The film’s ride on the bumpy road to equality in Utah offers a glimpse at the LDS church’s influence in state politics and the squabbles inside the gay community that nearly derailed a chance to make history. Church & State is a story of triumph, setback and a little-known lawsuit that should have failed, but instead paved the way for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay unions nationwide.
For more than 20 years, Wilcox has produced Emmy-award winning nonfiction television programing for the Discovery Channel, PBS and BYU Television, and has taught advanced courses in documentary at Brigham Young University. Wilcox is the founder of the Empathy First Initiative, a nonprofit that seeks to cultivate empathy in addressing divisive cultural issues and co-founded Mormons Building Bridges, which advocates for improved relations between the Mormon church and its LGBTQ members. Wilcox is currently working on a feature link documentary Far Between, which explores the experiences of gay Mormons. Tuckett is a documentary and narrative film producer and cinematographer. Her company, Flying Hat Productions, has produced more than 35 short narrative documentary, music video, commercial and industrial projects.
After 20 years and 205 films, DIY eccentric oddball Utah filmmaker Stephen Groo tries to make it big as he attempts to get one of his Hollywood fans, Jack Black, to be in his newest elf/human love story film ‘The Unexpected Race.’
Scott Christopherson is a BYU Media Arts faculty, named by Variety in 2015 to its “10 Documentary Filmmakers To Watch” list, and best known for co-directing the PBS documentary Peace Officer, which won an AML Film Award and the 2015 Documentary Feature Competition Grand Jury award at the South by Southwest Film Festival
States of America is a series of documentary shorts, featuring one person in each of the 50 states in the Union.
Brad Barber, is an Emmy nominated filmmaker and BYU Media Arts faculty, named by Variety to its 2015 “10 Documentary Filmmakers To Watch” list, and best known for co-directing the PBS documentary Peace Officer, which won an AML Film Award and the 2015 Documentary Feature Competition Grand Jury award at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
Narrative Film
Sister Jane Manning, a free black woman, and convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, returns to Nauvoo to find that Joseph Smith, her prophet and friend, has been assassinated. Jane spends a ceaseless night with his widow, Emma Smith, sitting watch over the body of the Prophet, as a whirlwind of memory, loss and confusion leaves them wondering how either one of them will be able to move forward. Through the long night, Jane wonders if the Prophet’s promise to extend the blessings of eternity to her has died along with him. Join these two remarkable women of faith on an imagined night that reveals the essence of their complex, raw, and ultimately beautiful friendship. Feature film.
Chantelle Squires previously directed and produced “Reserved To Fight“, a feature length documentary that received finishing funds from ITVS and aired nationally on PBS. She produced the third season of “The Generations Project” for BYUtv, which was awarded an Emmy for the episode “Natalie“.
Long Haul is a coming-of-age road drama set in the world of American long-haul trucking. Bo, an ultra-conservative teen – based on filmmaker Bryan Fugal’s own life – goes on a cross-country delivery job with his estranged father. During the journey, the son struggles with his parents’ divorce and discovering that his father is gay.
BYU student film, 19 minutes. When a young woman’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, she accepts a ride from a friendly passerby. But is he really a Good Samaritan, or is she in danger? “Best Fiction Film” at the 2018 BYU Final Cut Film Festival.
Robert Machoian Graham (BYU Department of Design [Photography]) and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck (California State University Monterey Bay)’s films have premiered at the Sundance, SXSW, and Locarno film festivals, among others. They were included in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2010. In 2016, their feature, God Bless the Child, won the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival and was nominated for the Cinema Eye Honors and Film Independent Spirit Awards’ Kiehl’s Someone to Watch prize. Machoian’s newest short film The Minors won aSpecial Jury Award for Directing during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
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Thrilling lists.