Audience Award Winners
We are delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Audience Awards, voted for by the most important people in the room: our Festival audience.
The 2025 Winners
Best Fiction Feature: BEAUTIFUL EVENING, BEAUTIFUL DAY
Directed by Ivona Juka
Best Documentary Feature: SHADES OF SURVIVAL
Directed by David Ayeni
Best Short Film: MONSTERS
Directed by Andy Field and Beckie Darlington
Congratulations to all the winning filmmakers. Your work clearly struck a powerful chord with our audience, and this recognition is very well deserved.
A Celebration of Audience Choice
The Audience Awards are a long-standing tradition at the Cambridge Film Festival, reflecting what has always been at the heart of our programme: the shared experience of cinema, the human experience.
All feature-length UK premieres screened at this year’s Festival were eligible for the Audience Award in both fiction and documentary categories. Every short film in the programme was also eligible for the Best Short Film award. At each eligible screening, scorecards were handed out and attendees were invited to rate the film. The winners were determined by the highest average scores across all votes cast.
This year, over 2,300 votes were submitted, underscoring the audience's continued commitment to thoughtful and boundary-pushing cinema.
The Power of the Cambridge Audience
The Cambridge audience is famously discerning and curious. These awards are not about hype, profile or prizes. They are about connection. About the films that moved people to stay in their seats, to talk in the foyer, and to share what they felt.
The 2025 winners highlight the wide-ranging storytelling and distinctive voices that our audiences champion:
SHADES OF SURVIVAL is a powerful, international documentary set across three continents that explores the lives of Black women in Africa, the UK and the USA, who have battled breast cancer. The film highlights the persistent inequities in outcomes for Black women, while celebrating the courage of those who advocate for change.
BEAUTIFUL EVENING, BEAUTIFUL DAY is a poetic yet powerful film that explores how authoritarian regimes seek control by forcing citizens to suppress their true identities and by inciting hatred toward the "other."
MONSTERS, made in collaboration with children across East Anglia, was part of our Children's Tales Short Fusion strand and is a moving, imaginative short about fears, friendship and the future. A locally rooted film with a universal message, it earned a particularly warm response from audiences of all ages.
Each of these films resonated in its own way, reminding us of the diverse perspectives that cinema can hold and the common ground it can create.
A Word from the Festival
“The Audience Awards are such a nice way to end the Festival,” said Owen Baker, part of the Festival Management Team. “Adding up the final scores and seeing that so many of the films we love have resonated with the Cambridge audience is incredibly rewarding. We often say this is a Festival made for and by our audience, and over 2,000 scorecards this year tell us that the audience continues to engage with the programme in a meaningful way. Huge congratulations to the winning filmmakers, and thank you to everyone who took the time to vote.”
A Final Thank You
Thank you to all the filmmakers, volunteers and audience members who made this year’s Festival so memorable. The Audience Awards are a fitting close to another fantastic edition, and we look forward to welcoming you back next year.