411_WIRE \ Festivals & AwardsPublished Nov 9, 2026 1 min read

Everybody Digs Bill Evans Wins Ojai as Anchor Baby Takes Screenplay

By Kinolime Editorial Team // Verified Human Journalist Review

Summary

Rob Burnett's In Memoriam was named best comedic feature at the 27th edition of the California festival.

"Grant Gee's Everybody Digs Bill Evans won best dramatic feature at the 27th Ojai Film Festival, Deadline reported on Sunday. Rob Burnett's In Memoriam took best comedic feature, and the best original screenplay award went to Anchor Baby, credited to Eduardo Moral Escudero.

The Ojai festival, held in the Southern California town of the same name, honors independent features, shorts and screenplays each fall. Deadline published the full winners list; the festival's own dates and prize amounts were not included in its report."

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The Kinolime Lens

"Small festivals don't make careers by themselves, and nobody at Ojai pretends otherwise. What they offer is a room full of people who watched the film on purpose, plus a laurel that reads well on a sales one-sheet. For a writer like Eduardo Moral Escudero, a screenplay prize at a festival with this kind of name recognition is a door opener in a town where most scripts never get a first read.

The winners also show where regional programmers are leaning. A music biopic told with a documentary maker's eye and a comedy from a veteran late-night producer are not obvious crowd-pleasers, and rewarding them signals a taste for craft over premise. That matters because hundreds of smaller festivals now act as the first filter for independent work, before any buyer sees it. If those juries reward risk, risk becomes a little cheaper to take. Ojai's list won't move the Oscar conversation. It may move a few careers, and that is the job."

Source:

Deadline

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Everybody Digs Bill Evans Wins Ojai as Anchor Baby Takes Screenplay

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