Festival Awards

Every October, the CMG Short Film Festival gathers filmmakers, audiences, and community members in Southern California for a weekend of screenings, panels, and celebrations of LGBTQ+ storytelling. The festival program spans dramatic narratives, documentaries, short comedy, and personal work from emerging voices as well as established directors, all selected for the festival's annual competition slate. Festival-goers attend individual films or full program blocks, then vote for the entries that stayed with them most, making audience participation a defining part of the experience rather than a formality.

The Audience Awards exist because of that participation. After each program, attendees cast ballots for the films they loved most, and the results are honored as Audience Award winners across the schedule's categories. The archive on this page tracks those winners by year, so visitors can look back at which titles connected with festival crowds in past seasons and see how the festival's tastes and concerns have shifted over time. Each entry pairs an award designation with the recognized film.

Festival Awards represent the juried side of the program, honoring films that stood out for craft, direction, writing, and production quality. While audience voting captures immediate emotional response, the festival awards recognize the technical and artistic achievements of the filmmakers themselves, often highlighting work that challenges conventions or brings overlooked stories into wider view. Together, the two award tracks celebrate both the community in the seats and the creators behind the camera, ensuring that recognition reaches throughout the festival lineup.

The festival is produced as a community effort, with proceeds supporting local LGBTQ+ film and cultural programming, and it is hosted around venues in the Los Angeles area with additional screenings and gatherings in places like Santa Monica and West Hollywood. Regular ticket holders, single-program guests, and pass holders all share the same open, welcoming atmosphere, and the box office and advance discount windows make it easy to plan a full weekend. Side events, including parties and filmmaker conversations, extend the program well beyond the screening blocks.

Beyond the current year's lineup and award recipients, the festival keeps an extensive archive of past programs, past lineups, and prior award tables, offering a long view of short filmmaking over many seasons. Hundreds of entries have appeared across the years, spanning documentary, drama, and short-form work from directors and producers whose careers have continued on festival circuits, in television, and in independent production. Visitors can browse the archive to discover filmmakers, revisit familiar titles, and understand the standards the festival upholds for submission and selection.