The 2025 Athena Film Festival has revealed this year’s festival award recipients and the 2025 Athena List, its Black List-inspired selection of unproduced screenplays focused on female leadership.
This year’s Breakthrough Award, in partnership with Netflix, goes to We Strangers writer-director Anu Valia. The $25,000 prize is given to a feature-length film directed by a first- or second-time filmmaker without a U.S. theatrical distribution deal.
The Chinonye Chukwu Emerging Writer Award goes to Vasundhara Koshy for The Laburnum House. The $10,000 prize, distributed in partnership with Christine A. Schantz, is designed to help a feature-length writer who previously participated in an Athena Film Festival Writers Lab develop their script. The award is named for the Clemency writer-director whose script for the acclaimed Alfre Woodard-starring death-row drama was on the Athena List.
And the festival will honor Jalena Keane-Lee with the second annual Jaya Award for her documentary Standing Above the Clouds, highlighting the movement to protect Mauna Kea through intergenerational stories of women in three Native Hawaiian families. The $10,000 grant, presented in partnership with the Ilumine Service Foundation, is given to a North American filmmaker whose film features a women-centric narrative with a compelling female lead.
The winners of the 2025 Athena List are Charlotte Scott-Wilson and Roelof Jan Minneboo’s Motherland, about two maids from a Scottish colonial house who form an alliance as they travel through Burma; Zara Symes’ A to Z biography of Phyllis Pearsall who walked every street of post-WWII London to create the first truly comprehensive and accessible city map; and Melody Cooper’s Cygnus thriller about how the U.S. deals with immigration, focused on two women. Cooper is also set to receive the $10,000 Athena List Development Grant to assist her in the development of her script.
And Gina Hackett, who wrote last year’s Athena List selection A Bridge Between Us about Emily Warren Roebling, the wife of Brooklyn Bridge chief engineer Washington Roebling, who steps into his role when he’s paralyzed during the bridge’s construction, becoming the world’s first female engineer, will receive the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Athena List Development Grant, a $20,000 prize given to an Athena List finalist or winner whose script focuses on a woman in a STEM-themed project.
In addition to Clemency, high-profile projects that were featured on past editions of the Athena List, include the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex, the 2024 Sundance film Out of My Mind by On the Basis of Sex writer Daniel Stiepleman and the Patricia Clarkson-starrer Lilly about Lilly Ledbetter and her fight for fair pay. Lilly will be screening at this year’s festival with Clarkson and writer-director Rachel Feldman in attendance. The festival this year is also celebrating 10 years of the Athena List, with past winners sharing their experiences and challenges of bringing their screenplay to fruition.
The festival has partnered with AMC Networks on the Future of Film: Athena Rising Stars, a curated selection of short films elevating women’s leadership and advancing inclusion, streaming on AMC+ starting March 14 and available for a month in celebration of Women’s History Month. The following are the six shorts from this year’s festival featured in the collection: Elegy for A Glacier directed by Stephanie Falkeis, OUTCRY: Alchemists of Rage directed by Clare Major, Desync directed by Minerva Navasca, Sol in the Garden directed by Débora Souza Silva and Emily Cohen Ibañez and Colorado directed by Pilar Gómez and Sandra Gallego. The AFF has also named Kaci Hamilton as the reicipient of the AMC Networks Athena Emerging Writers Fellowship, giving her a week-long writer’s room experience with the Dark Winds team and $10,000 to advance her writing career.
“The Athena Film Festival’s 15th anniversary milestone comes at a time when providing financial support to creators and storytellers has never been so important,” Athena Film Festival artistic director Melissa Silverstein said in a statement. “The fellowships, grants, and lab initiatives the festival offers are central to our mission to empower the artists who will tell the next generation of women’s leadership stories.”
Athena Center for Leadership director Umbreen Bhatti added, “We’re ecstatic to celebrate this year’s honorees — talented filmmakers who have the vision and courage to tell stories of complex, nuanced, and diverse women leaders. For 15 years, Athena has been at the forefront of driving narrative change and helping our culture reimagine all that women can be and do. I am grateful to the storytellers who are leading this charge and to all of our sponsors, including the festival’s founding sponsor, the Artemis Rising Foundation and its CEO, Regina K. Scully, for their unwavering support of this work.”
The 15th annual Athena Film Festival kicks off Thursday and runs through Sunday at Barnard College and is a partnership between the school’s Athena Center for Leadership and Women and Hollywood. The full schedule for this year’s festival is available here.
AFF has also announced the recipients of its Writers Lab Fellowship and its Documentary Pitch Program Cohort, which are listed below.
2025 Athena Film Festival Writers Lab Fellowships
The Athena Film Festival Writers Lab is a three-day creative development workshop for emerging writers. Fellows receive additional mentorship and travel and accommodation to attend the festival.
The Alfred P. Sloan AFF Writers Lab Fellows
• Beaverton by Emma Parker (episodic)
• Eruption by Katla Sólnes (screenplay)
• Exodus by Leslie Borchert (episodic)
• Inventrix, The: Margaret Knight Biopic by Michael Ann Dobbs (screenplay)
• RARE EARTH by Nadine Pequeneza (screenplay)
The Loreen Arbus AFF Writers Lab Fellows
• Pain & Jane by Cheryl Meyer (episodic)
• Ripe by Melanie Ojwang (episodic)
2025 AFF Documentary Pitch Program Cohort
Athena’s annual Documentary Pitch Program supports documentarians working on women-centered projects through dynamic coaching and peer mentorship, culminating in a live pitch to industry representatives. This program is sponsored by Secret Sauce Media.
Credible Fear
Director: Gabrielle Ewing, Producer: Azadeh Nikzadeh
When Yojana, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, and Amy, a DC attorney, are matched through a pro bono legal aid program in the US’ largest immigration detention center, a chance encounter turns into a lifelong friendship, forged in their shared determination to find justice. Filmed over the course of 7 years, this longitudinal film reveals the intricacies and failures of the asylum system through the intimate journey of one case, serving as a sobering counterpoint to a hyper-politicized and widely misunderstood issue.
Human Shield
Director: Erin Persley, Producer: Rajal Pitroda
Facing a growing far-right extremist movement, Human Shield is an intimate portrait of abortion clinic escorts protecting vulnerable patients as they endure one of the most hostile 30-second walks of their lives. Told through the perspective of three clinic escort leaders in Ohio, North Carolina and Maryland, this film investigates the struggle to maintain safety and battle mental exhaustion on the front lines of America’s longest culture war.
The Fruit of the Pacay Tree
Director Ruolin Luyo, Producer: Kristal Sotomayor
After decades as an undocumented immigrant, Celina returns to Peru to fix her status, torn between two countries while seeking stability and reconciling her past.
Watch You Rise
Director: Isabella Grace Cohn, Producer: Elizabeth Woodward & Marina Hunt
WATCH YOU RISE is a believing-into-being documentary that grows up alongside director Isabella Grace Cohn as she works to understand and expose the roots of sexual harm — her peers’, her mother’s, and eventually her own. Along the way, she meets diverse survivors, perpetrators, and experts. Together, they explore the cultural, educational and legal gray areas that fuel the cycle of harm in a quest for hope and transformation.
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