Good Golly Film Awards 2025
I tabled at the Ottawa Comics Arts Festival last weekend and alongside my regular spread, I prepped a new zine to bring with me. I was feeling especially inspired to do something analogue and I dug through my bin of scraps to collage a mini zine based on my favourite films from the last year.
2025 was a big movie-watching year for me. It's been so fun catching new releases--being one of the herd and part of the conversation. Then, after watching as many movies as I could, I love the awards season!
I love the glitz and the glam of the red carpets, and I love judging what everyone is wearing. I love the speeches. I love putting all my hope behind one project and then complaining about the actual winners (who are inevitably not the people I was rooting for). I love shouting at the TV that Adrian Brody shouldn't have won Best Actor, even though I didn't even watch /The Brutalist/ (lol) and then grimacing when he tossed his chewed up piece of his gum to his partner. It's fun, but the awards shows are always disappointing. After watching the Oscars this year, I started building my own award show roster to highlight my favourite films from the year.
The All-Around Perfect Film
It Was Just An Accident, dir. Jafar Panahi
It's been months since I first saw this and I'm still thinking about it. It was beautiful, hectic, and thoughtful. The ending is perfect and nuanced. The story and the characters stay with you and force you to confront discomfort.
In journalism school, people loved to say that journalism is meant to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." I think the same is true for filmmaking. I want to be challenged and confronted. I want films to be unpredictable. I want to learn something. But I also want beauty and warmth. It was Just An Accident does all of that.
This movie mostly takes place in a van--or something around the van. It's so tight and contained but the subject-matter is big and heavy--a perfect contrast.
I think this is the same claustrophobia that I love in The Bear, The Pitt, and movies like Shiva Baby.
It Was Just An Accident is a perfect film and I'm so excited to watch it again.
The Triple Threat Award
Eva Victor in Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor is the director, writer, and star in Sorry, Baby and it's just a phenomenal film.
It faces tragedy and abuse head-on without being exploitative and cruel. Victor deals with the heavy subject matter with such grace and care. As a viewer, we're cushioned into a story of violence and recovery.
Although the film is about violence, it doesn't center it. Instead it centers grief and friendship. It doesn't shock or scare audiences away from the difficult material. This is a movie that cares deeply about the story and it's viewers. It's beautiful and heartfelt, and a must-watch.
The Cry Baby Award
Hamnet, dir. Chloé Zhao
I really didn't think I would love a movie about William Shakespeare as much as I did, but I loved this film. I'm a bit of a sucker for a movie that makes me cry, if you couldn't tell by the others on this list.
Some of the online discussion about this film was that it was being "emotionally manipulative" because it draws you into the story, shows you so much love, and then rips your heart out. But isn't that just what filmmaking is all about? There's value in movies made purely for entertainment, but when a film does more then entertain, maybe that's what art is all about. I don't think it's a bad thing for movies to make us cry, I think that can be such a relief. It's nice to take a break from real life sadness and cry about a fictional person's life, right? [^1]
For Innovation in Filmmaking
The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania
This film takes real audio from the emergency center's calls with Hind Rajab and recreates the horrible tragedy of her murder through the perspective of the staff at the emergency call center.
The movie highlights the nightmarish, but very real, irony of having to "collaborate" with the state when the state is the perpetrator of the very violence they are trying to fight and protect against. The film follows closely along the Palestinian first-responders as they push and push for Hind's salvation. Most audiences know how this movie ends before even stepping in the cinema. We know she doesn't make it. We know this 5-year-old girl, who just watched the rest of her family die, will also be shot by the Israel Defense Forces.
The innovation is in how they incorporate real audio from Hind's call with the Red Crescent first-responders. We never see her, but we hear her real voice, her real fear, her real grief. It's so heartbreaking and so powerful.
I guess if you want to know what other movies made it to the Good Golly Film Awards, you'll have to pick up a copy of my new mini zine!