FHI Announces 2024 Full Frame Award Winner, Celebrates Awardees of Recent Years

Each year since 2020, as part of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute convenes a jury to present the Franklin Humanities Institute Award to a short film that highlights documentary as a formally inventive artistic medium, recognizing significant innovation and excellence in cinematography, sound design, style, structure, and other aesthetic dimensions.

For the 2024 festival — which marked Full Frame's first in-person convening since 2019 — the Franklin Humanities Institute Award was presented to Aylin Gökmen's Ever Since, I Have Been Flying, a 19-minute poetic short film centering on Vakif, a Kurdish man, and his recollections of growing up among his nomadic community in Turkey. In considering the film, and Gökmen's portrayal of Vakif's memories, the FHI jury wrote:

"A relationship to the past is presented not as a story of idealized Kurdish authenticity so much as a series of recording devices that provide a way of representing how the indigenous and their landscapes have been documented. More than an individual who tells his story, more than human even, [Vakif] becomes landscape and air, becomes planetary. In the face of human violation, he soars into another way of being."

The full list of 2024 Full Frame Award Winners can be found here.

FHI also wishes to recognize Franklin Humanities Institute Award Winners from recent years:

• 2022: Alejandro Alonso, Abyssal
• 2021: Logan L. Burroughs, Spirit never dies, only transitions.
• 2020: Hannes Lang, Riafn