Best Filmmaker
If you think it’s hard to judge two entirely different films against each other according to purely subjective criteria (and it is), try doing it with filmmakers. And so we have a tie between documentarian (and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival founder) Doug Hawes-Davis and horror polymath Ted Geoghegan. Hawes-Davis (with filmmaking partner Drury Gunn Carr) is perhaps most widely known for 2004’s Libby, Montana and 2002’s This is Nowhere (three more documentary features are scheduled for release between now and winter 2008, including Brave New West, about iconoclastic Moab newspaperman Jim Stiles, due this fall). Geoghegan, of course, despite a résumé full of bit parts and intriguing collaborations, is best known locally as the writer and director of Ghouls Gone Wild, the 2004 ghost-town lark otherwise known as The International Playboys’ First Movie.