2025 Festival Awards

Portland Panorama Announces winners of the 2025 Panorama Film Festival awards

The 2025 Portland Panorama Film Festival closed its inaugural edition with the announcement of this year’s jury award winners. From April 10–20, 2025, the festival brought films from around the globe and across the US, celebrating both bold and emerging voices. The final weekend showcased stories from the Pacific Northwest, flexing the region’s flourishing creative community and the power of cinematic storytelling to connect us all.  

With filmmakers arriving from across the globe, packed theaters, educational panels, musical performances, and a slate of over 120 films, the festival buzzed with an electric sense of community among audiences hungry for an extended film festival honoring both connection and creativity. Over 4,600 tickets were sold over the 11-day event. 

The 2025 Portland Panorama Jury Award Winners were chosen by our panel of distinguished jurors Ayako Fujitani, Daniel Littlewood, Irene Taylor, Janique L Robillard, and Rana San. 

The awards are as follows:

- Best Narrative Feature
- Best Narrative Short  
- Best Documentary Feature
- Best Doc Short
- Bushra Azzouz Impact Award
- Audience Choice Award
-Made in Oregon Award

Our 2025 Festival Jurors

  • Narrative Jury

    Ayako Fujitani was 13 years old when she debuted in the Japanese movie GAMERA: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE. Since then, she has built her career as an actor and writer for Film/TV, collaborating with international directors and producers. She first penned articles for a widely read Japanese movie magazine called Road Show, and her first novel, Flee Dream, inspired director Hideaki Anno (EVANGELION, SHIN GODZILLA) to adapt it into RITUAL (2000), the first non-animated feature film by Studio Ghibli. Ayako then starred in SANSA (2003) by French director Siegfried which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, director Michel Gondry (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) hand picked Ayako to play

    the lead in TOKYO! (2008). Later, he followed up and featured Ayako in his documentary short called "How to Blow Up a Helicopter (Ayako's Story)." After Ayako moved to Los Angeles in 2009, she starred in MAN FROM RENO (2015), directed by Dave Boyle, which was nominated for the John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award. She also starred in TV shows such as THE LAST SHIP and MOZART IN THE JUNGLE. She co-wrote a short film with Director Park Chan-Wook (OLD BOY) called “A Rose Reborn” which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

    She wrote and directed the short films "The Doors" and "BOW WOW BOW" which premiered to French audiences at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival. Ayako Co-wrote “Tokyo Cowboy” with Dave Boyle and starred which showed in theaters world wide. Ayako currently lives in Portland from where she continues her growth as an actor/writer/filmmaker sipping on good coffee.


  • Documentary Jury

    Daniel Littlewood is a Group Creative Director for branded content at Vox Media, where he's worked on videos with hundreds of brands across all industries. He brings his experience and sensibility as a journalist, documentary editor, and oral historian to every project. He was editor and associate producer on the feature documentary “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock And Roll” which played nationally and received a four star review in the New York Times. His involvement began after five years spent living in Cambodia, where he helped found a documentary production house.


  • Documentary Jury

    Irene Taylor is an Oscar-nominated, multiple-Emmy, duPont and Peabody-winning director and

    Producer. Her most recent feature documentary I AM: Celine Dion premiered in June 2024 at Lincoln Center, entered a nationwide theatrical release, and soon became – and remains -- Amazon Prime’s most streamed documentary of all time, worldwide. Irene also explored our human obsession with the arboreal world in her film Trees and Other Entanglements, released by HBO in 2023. In 2022, she won a Columbia-DuPont Award for her tragic investigation into

    one of the most trusted institutions in America, Leave No Trace: A Hidden History of The Boy Scouts (ABC News Studios, Hulu). Premiering at Sundance 2019 and later nominated for Special Merit in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2020 Primetime Emmy Awards, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements tells Irene’s very personal story about her deaf son, her deaf father and Ludwig Van Beethoven, as he went deaf while composing his famous sonata.


    Irene began her documentary career in photojournalism. Her first feature, Hear and Now, a

    documentary memoir about her deaf parents, won the Sundance Audience Award in 2007, a Peabody and top awards at festivals around the world. It was also nominated by the Producers Guild of America in 2008 for Documentary of the Year. Her HBO true-crime documentary about two adolescent girls obsessed with an internet bogeyman,Beware the Slenderman, received several nominations for an Emmy in 2017 and two Critics Choice Awards for Best Director and Best Documentary.


    She is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a producer for CBS Sunday Morning in 1998-2001. Irene founded Vermilion Films in 2006 and is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Television Academy. She lives in Portland, Oregon.


  • Narrative Jury

    Rana San is an intermedia artist, choreographer, writer, and curator. Her practice centers experimental and analog approaches to storytelling through film, writing, and movement presented on screen and stage. Based between Seattle and Istanbul, she co-directs the Cadence Video Poetry Festival.

  • Janique L Robillard is an independent documentary filmmaker and freelance producer. Her most recent producing credits include two films with Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Kim A. Snyder and producing partner Maria Cuomo Cole – DEATH BY NUMBERS, which is nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards: Best Documentary Short Film, and THE LIBRARIANS (PBS/Independent Lens) which is making its world premiere at 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Her freelance work also includes live action and animated content, broadcast commercials for Nike and other major brands and music videos for artists including Lauren Flax, Bob Mould, Love Letters, and First Aid Kit. Janique actively seeks opportunities to elevate marginalized communities in film, evidenced in her short film 1000 TIMES (a women’s MMA documentary) and on-going collaboration with Free Body Project, including their short FROM THERE TO HERE featuring women using dance movement therapy for survivors of sexual and gender based violence in Kolkata, India. Previous credits include Associate Producer for director Jeremiah Zagar’s THE FIX docu-series (Roku, 2022), and has developed numerous documentary films and series for acclaimed directors like Lina Plioplyte and clients including Netflix.

We are honored to celebrate and support this year’s outstanding award winners with a selection of creative prizes:

  • Best Documentary Feature and Best Narrative Feature winners will each receive a one-year Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

  • Best Documentary Short, Best Narrative Short, Made in Oregon Award, and Audience Choice Award winners will each receive a large Wacom Intuos Pro Tablet with pen.

  • The Bushra Azzouz Impact Award winner will receive both an Adobe Subscription and a Wacom Tablet.

Best Narrative
Feature: TrASH BABY

The year is 2003 and it’s another sweltering summer in Pine Park. After an unexpected run-in with the cool girl next door, Stevie (12) finds herself befriending trail park queen and neighbor, Edie (20). Swirling in a new world of puberty, boys, and drinking, Stevie is convinced it is time to leave childhood behind in exchange for new friends and a world she has long romanticized.

Director: Jacy Mairs

Best Narrative Short:
Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado

A young woman living abroad returns to her hometown in Mexico in the hope of reconnecting with her past.

Director: Natalia León

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Ashima

One of the world’s youngest elite rock climbers, Ashima Shiraishi spent her formative years breaking numerous age-based climbing milestones, spurred on by her number one fan and coach, her father, Poppo a retired Butoh dancer and avant-garde performer with no formal climbing experience. When these New Yorkers travel to South Africa to conquer a V14 boulder problem, father and daughter must face their interpersonal struggles in tandem with the challenging ascent.

Director: Kenji Tsukamoto

Best documentary short: Chimera

This short documentary highlights Portland based professional skateboarder, James Alby in the aftermath of his mothers passing and his journey into ceramic art.

Director: Daniel Ray Cantu

Audience Choice Award: Trash Baby

The year is 2003 and it’s another sweltering summer in Pine Park. After an unexpected run-in with the cool girl next door, Stevie (12) finds herself befriending trail park queen and neighbor, Edie (20). Swirling in a new world of puberty, boys, and drinking, Stevie is convinced it is time to leave childhood behind in exchange for new friends and a world she has long romanticized.

Director: Jacy Mairs

Bushra Azzouz IMPACT Award: FireBreak

Brandon and Royal are among a small group of firefighters in California who were trained while incarcerated and managed to break through and become professional firefighters post-release, but that’s not the story for most of their peers. After securing their own careers, they decided to take matters into their own hands and start their own nonprofit and fire department.

Director: Kenzie Bruce

Bushra Azzouz was a filmmaker, teacher, and researcher whose work explored everything from children’s dreams and youth homelessness to public transit policy, water rights, and the organic food movement. At the Northwest Film Center, she mentored a generation of filmmakers with both warmth and rigor, guiding hundreds through the challenges of directing and editing meaningful, high-quality work.

Her own films gave subjects full agency to tell their stories: an indigenous woman preserving a vanishing craft, the reverberations of 9/11 on her Iraqi-American family, women seeking peace in Cyprus, and incarcerated men connecting through Shakespeare. These were not just films—they were acts of transformation.

Portland Panorama honors Bushra's legacy as a filmmaker and community leader with the annual Bushra Azzouz Impact Award. This award celebrates a poetic and meditative style of filmmaking, while underscoring the importance of allowing a film's subject to collaborate in the making of the film and telling of their story.

MADE IN OREGON AWARD: Finding Groovopolis

Filmmaker Wil Kristin seeks fatherly advice through the lens of Groovopolis, a never-produced comedic screenplay written by his late dad. While coming to terms with his dad’s death, Kristin discovered the original script for Groovopolis, which follows a music programmer who falls overboard at a work party, encounters a group of wild, dancing island inhabitants, and inadvertently records their music before being rescued and spreading the sounds as an antidote to dull and monotonous consumer culture.

Director: Will Kristin

Celebrating the long legacy of Oregon filmmakers and films made in this state, this award is presented to a standout project that was created in Oregon, by an Oregon-based filmmaker. It reflects our pride in our talented crews, the strength of our community, and the creative vitality found across our beautiful state.

About Panorama

Built by artists for artists Portland Panorama serves as a dynamic international hub for filmmaking, bridging global voices with Portland’s creative community to foster exchange, build connections, and establish our city as a premier destination for innovative and diverse creative talent. The 501(c)(3) was founded in 2024.

For more information please download a PDF of the Press Release. For press related Inquiries, please contact info@portlandpanorama.org.

Portland Panorama extends its deepest gratitude to our many sponsors, community partners, volunteers, and the audiences who came out to be a part of this first year. As we look ahead to next year’s festival, we are excited to keep growing and elevating, ensuring Portland has the dynamic, world-class film festival its creative spirit deserves.