Montclair Film Festival Announces 2026 Winners: Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love Wins Fiction Feature Prize
MONTCLAIR, N.J. — Montclair Film on Oct. 26 announced the winners of the 2026 Montclair Film Festival's competitions. Possible Love, directed by Lee Chang-dong of South Korea, won the Fiction Feature Prize, and Rehearsals for a Revolution, directed by Pegah Ahangarani, won the Bruce Sinofsky Award, the festival's top documentary prize. The 15th annual festival ran Oct. 16–25 in Montclair, New Jersey.
Possible Love is Lee's first feature since Burning (2018). It competed in the Fiction Feature section against All of a Sudden by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski, Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev and Rose by Markus Schleinzer. The fiction jury was Zachary Barnes of The Wall Street Journal, Ashley Clark of Criterion and producer Mila Matveeva.
The Documentary Jury also awarded a Special Jury Prize to One in a Million, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. In the Future/Now competition for early-career filmmakers, Bedford Park by Stephanie Ahn and TheyDream by William D. Caballero tied, sharing the $5,000 Mark Urman Award for Filmmaking, established in 2019 in memory of film distribution executive and longtime Montclair resident Mark Urman.
Audience Awards went to Wild Horse Nine by Martin McDonagh for Fiction Feature, My NDA by Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor for Documentary Feature, All of a Sudden by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi for World Cinema, and An Unknown Substance by Steven Leckart for Short Film.
In the shorts competitions, I Saw You in the Flood by K. Xian Ming Yu won Fiction Short, Buckskin by Mars Verrone won Documentary Short, and US Being Epic by Jeannette Louie won the New Jersey Shorts competition. The Junior Jury of 15 area high school students gave its top prize to Mouse by Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, with a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography to Senzo Ueno for his work on Look Back, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
"Congratulations to our award winners for their outstanding work," said Montclair Film Artistic Director Tom Hall. "The connection these films forged with our festival audiences created an incredible atmosphere of conversation, connection, and community." Montclair Film is a nonprofit organization whose year-round programs attract more than 83,000 annual attendees.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：导演李沧东（左一）与《燃烧》主创团队2018年在法国戛纳电影节亮相（资料图）。照片：Georges Biard，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。/ Photo: Director Lee Chang-dong (far left) with the Burning team at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 (file photo). Photo by Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
