2026 Atticus Award Winners

The filmmaker returns to her childhood home to confront her past and an abusive father in this searing coming-of-age story.

This is a quiet, cinematic portrait of the bond between a single father and his young son. Told through the gentle rhythms of an ordinary day, this short film captures the closeness, trust, and love that grow in the quiet moments - a world made up of small gestures, shared routines, and unspoken understanding.

When Adamma and her father, Jide, seek refuge in an asylum centre in Ireland they are greeted by angry protestors, but a dangerous situation threatens to become explosive when Adamma ventures out into the neighborhood alone in search of her missing cuddly toy, Kiki.

Young Freya loves her dad, even though he doesn't always give the same amount of love back. She learns that it’s not always easy to get recognition from your parents. We follow her journey and while growing up she develops a passion for climbing.

The NAACP-nominated feature documentary produced by Orlando Magic's Cole Anthony and Grammy Award winner Cece Winans, Fatherless No More chronicles the remarkable journey of an Orlando-based pastor and former Super Bowl Champion, who was driven by a divine calling to move into an RV at a place often deemed hell on earth: Rikers Island. His commitment to do the unthinkable evolved into over a year of profound encounters and transformed lives within the jail walls.

The Memory Loophole is a feature-length documentary combining live-action footage and hand-painted animation. The film follows Victoria, a woman in her 30s, as she searches for an understanding of the father she lost as a child — and the emotional blueprint his absence left behind.

When Victoria was eleven, her father died of AIDS-related suicide, leaving her only fragments — a few photos, unfinished stories, and the outline of a man shaped by secrecy she never understood as a child. Years later, her grandmother hands her a cassette he recorded at twenty-one. The voice on the tape — warm, hopeful, startlingly alive — becomes a doorway into the father she never knew.

The film is a personal testimony about the relationship between a father and son who embark on a journey together through the family’s past, marked by various events, from divorce, to the departure of the father and grandfather from the family, to new marriages. Through intimate footage and poetic narration, we follow the protagonist as he tries to understand the past and come to terms with the present. The film offers a deeper insight into family relationships that shape our identity despite their complexity. Ultimately, it is a story about forgiveness, acceptance, and the need to understand one’s origins in order to move forward.

A father embarks on a plan to train his physically disabled son to bag groceries in the hopes of him landing a job and a path to independence.

The daily walk home from school is one of the special times shared between a Dad and his son.

On Sunday 15 June 2025, just ahead of Father’s Day, global gender justice campaign, #StandWithHer, launched a new 20-minute film documenting a rare conversation between Ziauddin Yousafzai, father of Malala who at 15-years-old was shot by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education in Pakistan, and Ranjit, father of Kiran (pseudonym) from the Oscar-nominated film, To Kill a Tiger, which chronicles Ranjit’s pursuit of justice after his daughter is sexually assaulted in India.

These fathers of remarkable daughters met in New York in March 2025 to share their stories. The result is a frank and deeply moving conversation that offers an illuminating insight into the crucial role and power of male allyship. Both dads are part of #StandWithHer, a campaign advocating for gender equality around the world and that sees the role of men and boys as critical to that pursuit.

A young man reconnects with his father after many years of distance. In the process of reconciliation- he decides to make a film about it.

The Youth Documentary Academy (YDA) prepares a new generation of underrepresented storytellers and helps them locate and amplify their voices through the art of documentary film. Through instruction, production, and distribution, YDA helps young people transpose their own stories into broadly accessible and impactful media, opening the door to courageous conversations.

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Founded in 2014, YDA trains young people how to locate stories, often derived from their lived experiences, and direct their own documentary films. In a two-month summer intensive, students learn all aspects of documentary filmmaking from professional filmmakers, faculty, and guest artists.  At the end of the program, students complete a high-caliber, high-impact film, and learn how to distribute it to festivals, community organizations, and broadcast outlets.