Winner
AWI Short Film Competition

Paper Planes (trailer)

Vellum’s confidence erodes after losing his father and as sixth-grade graduation approaches, the local bullies try to keep him grounded while his small circle of friends do everything they can to lift him up.

Content heads-up: Implication of the loss of a father

Director: Sina Sultani and Humirah Sultani

Sina Sultani is an 80-time award-winning writer, director, producer and member of the PGA and CMPA with recent participations in the Netflix Diversity of Voices initiative, Sony Diversity Mentorship program, New York-based Cinephilia Development Workroom and the Future Visions 21 program out of the Bavarian Film Centre in Munich. He is committed to ensuring equitable representation through cultural collaboration using his unique blend of indie filmmaking combined with his studio-level experience with ILM and Sony on projects such as Terminator: Dark Fate, Space Jam: A New Legacy and the upcoming Spider-Verse sequel. He’s currently in production on his first animated short while developing his first live-action, sci-fi feature. Humirah Sultani is a self-taught creative based out of Calgary, Alberta. Inspired by her dual cultural identity, Humirah is working on a photography project to recover and redefine Hazara visual identity in the Afghan diaspora, which has been misused for centuries to persecute the Hazara people. She is also co-developing and facilitating an online competition for Afghan Canadian youth in the spirit of processing intergenerational trauma through creativity. She participated in AAAWA’s Afghan Literary Futures creative writing workshop series alongside Afghan American writers and artists. With her parents’ encouragement, she took every opportunity to learn, recognizing education as a catalyst for freedom, independence and autonomy. As a career hospital pharmacist in pediatric oncology, she works closely with children and families that have inspired a deep sense of joy and hope, which has been imbued into her work. Her canvas includes traditional illustration, digital painting and animation infused with inspiration from her favourite artists, Yoshitaka Amano and Mahmoud Farshchian. Her poems, stories and stacks of sketches, paintings and paper craft have prepared her for this next challenge, her first animated short film, Paper Planes.