Columbia Filmmakers Champion LGBTQ+ Stories at NewFest2025; Nana Duffour '25 Takes Home Three Prizes
Update:
The 37th edition of NewFest wrapped on October 21, 2025 and Film alum Nana Duffour '25 emerged as one of the night’s brightest stars, sweeping three top honors across the Jury, Audience and Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker categories.
With 131 projects in this year’s lineup, NewFest 2025 brought together a distinguished jury of LGBTQ+ film creatives, agents, activists and journalists to select this year’s Jury Award winners. Duffour’s captivating short Rainbow Girls earned the title of the Grand Jury Award for New York Short Film, presented in partnership with The Gotham Film & Media Institute.
Not only that—Rainbow Girls went on to win the Audience Award for Best Narrative Short, voted on by in-person attendees of the festival, while Duffour herself was honored with the Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award. The award, part of NewFest’s Black Filmmakers Initiative and established in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, celebrates three emerging artists whose short-form work spotlights queer Black narratives with remarkable cinematic vision.
Before its NewFest triumph, Rainbow Girls earned the 2025 Frameline Completion Grant and was selected for The Gotham Week Project Market’s U.S. Shorts to Features Section which connects filmmakers with industry executives interested in developing feature-length versions of their short films.
The seed of the idea for Rainbow Girls, for Duffour, was inspired by the moniker of the same name given to a loose band of Black trans and cisgender women in their early twenties who, in 2014, launched a series of robberies in San Francisco's most exclusive luxury brand stores. Reflecting on her vision in her director’s statement, Duffour recalls, “As a former teenager with sticky fingers, and a lover of heist films, I imagined a story that centers around the friendship between three charismatic young trans women, pushed to society’s margins, who unapologetically push back by looting luxury items associated with the type of wealth, privilege, and prestige that they are often denied.”
NewFest Executive Director David Hatkoff said, “This year’s award-winning films reflect the boldness, imagination, and refusal to shrink that define our community. From audacious features to visionary shorts, these storytellers are not only pushing the craft forward—they’re reminding us that queer cinema has always been a site of resistance, connection, and joy.”
See a full list of NewFest 2025 winners here.
—
Original: October 14, 2025
NewFest Film Festival is back for its 37th edition, running from October 9 to October 21 in Manhattan and Brooklyn and featuring 144 titles from over 25 countries—including several films by Columbia filmmakers.
“Celebrating queer stories is an act of rebellion—one that challenges erasure and insists on visibility,” said NewFest Executive Director David Hatkoff in a statement. “This festival has always been a space for resistance, celebration, and community, which is all the more vital as LGBTQ+ stories come under attack. The stakes are high—let’s watch films, push back, and have a damn good time doing it.”
In this year’s lineup, Columbia filmmakers have their short films featured across a variety of the festival’s sections:
Rainbow Girls
Directed by Nana Duffour '25
Section: Here Come The Dolls
In Rainbow Girls, directed by Film alum Nana Duffour '25, San Francisco’s tech boom and its consequent gentrification forces friends Tati, Angel, and Gemini to fight back. Together, they stage an audacious heist targeting the city’s most exclusive luxury brands.
The film is being screened as part of Here Come The Dolls, an audacious shorts program celebrating the vision and brilliance of trans women and those who love them. These genre-defying films span vengeful resurrections, satanic rituals, shoplifters waging war on capitalism, secret cults, and shadow selves—crowning the Dolls as auteurs, protagonists, dreamers, and disruptors.
Strawberry Shortcake
Directed by Deborah Devyn Chuang
Section: Avant Queer
Strawberry Shortcake, directed by Film student Deborah Devyn Chuang, is a surreal coming-of-age short following a 16-year-old Lolo, who becomes caught in a Freudian loop between fantasy, reality and the figure of their mother.
The Avant Queer section features bold films which offer inventive visions that expand the possibilities of cinema while illuminating the spectrum of queer experience. Through experimental narratives, striking aesthetics, and complex queer characters, each work pushes the medium forward with daring originality. Themes of family, connection, and transformation are woven throughout, showing how emotion and innovation can converge to reimagine both storytelling and queer life.
Meal Pal
Directed by Chen Xie
Section: Food, Glorious Food
In Meal Pal, directed by Film student Chen Xie, two lonely strangers meet in a motel after midnight and share a magical, fleeting encounter.
The short screens as part of the Food, Glorious Food section, a program celebrating the many ways in which food—messy, magical or downright absurd—shapes our lives. From surprise dinner guests and the beautiful chaos of family to mysterious meal companions across the table, these films converse in a universal language beyond words: food.
2 Girls Kissing
Directed by Noah Schamus
Section: Dyke Nyte
2 Girls Kissing by Noah Schamus '18 follows a young director whose nerves unravel when her lead actress, who is also her girlfriend, refuses to answer calls or show up on set.
The short is featured in a program brimming with dyke drama and lesbian longing containing an eclectic mix of eight sapphic shorts. From sunlit flirtations and meet cutes at Riis Beach to the heated tension of a couple’s painting debate, a fearless barrel racer’s second chance at love and the panic of a newly out woman on a double date—these eight queer stories trace the humor, tenderness and tension of lesbian love and life.