Our Best Short Film winner will receive our custom Global Shorts statuette which we ship anywhere in the world, free of charge. The award is manufactured by Society Awards, the same awards company that manufactures the Golden Globe and the Emmy. All winners will receive our Global Shorts Winner laurels in black, white, and gold.
Title: No Crime In Sin
Runtime: 39 min
Country: USA
Director: Amanda Stoddard
Placement: Honorable Mention
Competition: September 30, 2019
Synopsis: Told through fractured bits of interview and cinema vérité footage, NO CRIME IN SIN is a portrait of the shattered lives of sexual abuse victims. All three Johnson daughters were sexually abused by their father over the course of decades. The Mormon Church knew about this recurring abuse, did nothing to stop it, and ended up putting countless other children at risk as a result. This story exemplifies a systemic problem: the patriarchal conspiracy of silence which permits sex abuse to run rampant within the Mormon Church.
Since the late 1980s, Kristy Johnson and her siblings have been plagued by unanswered questions about why their father never served time in prison, and how the Mormon Church was able to sweep their father’s abuse under the rug. In 2016, Kristy, her sister Kathy, and her brother Kim took a trip to confront their father and ask him those very questions. What followed was an enlightening encounter between three siblings and their father—an unraveling of past mysteries in a last-ditch effort for justice.
This portrait reflects the turmoil imposed on the lives of these siblings by the selfish, criminal acts of their father. We took precautions to ensure that the tone remains raw and unflinching while respecting the dignity of those who have already suffered tremendously. At its core, this film is about an emotional, lifelong search for hope with a broken compass.
