"Eighth Grade" wins Audience Award at 6th Annual Chicago Critics Film Festival

(Chicago, IL) — The Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA), the Chicago-area print, online and broadcast critics group that celebrates the art of film and film criticism, today announces the Audience Award winners following the 6th Chicago Critics Film Festival. Audiences selected Closing Night feature presentation Eighth Grade as winner of the Audience Award for narrative features; the film screened to a sold-out crowd as the festival wrapped up on May 10 at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theater.  

Additionally, Three Identical Strangers, the incredible true story of three triplets separated at birth and reunited years later, received the Audience Award for documentary, while two short films tied for Audience Award honors: Runner, written and directed by Chicago-based filmmaker Clare Cooney, and We Forgot to Break Up.

The sixth edition of the festival also boasted the largest crowds to date, with a nearly 15% increase in ticket sales over 2017’s affair, the largest growth year-over-year for the highly-anticipated annual event. Special guests this year included Gugu Mbatha-Raw (A Wrinkle in Time) and Jordan Horowitz (La La Land) with Opening Night selection Fast Color; writer/director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) with First Reformed; Bo Burnham (The Big Sick) with his feature film debut, Eighth Grade; and many more. Images from the 2018 Chicago Critics Film Festival can be found here. 

“We’re beyond thrilled with the reception of this year’s festival,” said producers and programmers Erik Childress and Brian Tallerico. “Not only was it our strongest slate of films, as filmmakers and studios continue to recognize the audiences they can connect to through us, but the lines wrapped around the block throughout the week prove that Chicago film lovers are eager and hungry for the quality of films we present.”

As the week-long event came to a close, it was also announced that the Chicago Critics Film Festival would participate in the City of Chicago’s outdoor film series at Millennium Park, selecting Mad Max: Fury Road to screen Tuesday, June 12 at Pritzker Pavilion. The summer series features selections from several different film festivals around the city.

Runner-up for Best Film Festival in the Chicago Reader’s 2017 “Best of Chicago” poll, the CCFF annually features a selection of acclaimed films chosen by members of the organization, a combination of recent festival favorites and as-yet-undistributed works from a variety of filmmakers, from established Oscar winners to talented newcomers. It is the only current example of a major film critics group that hosts its own festival. The seventh edition of the festival will return in May of 2019.