Montclair Film Festival 2026: 'Possible Love' and 'Wild Horse Nine' Take Top Prizes

Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" has won the fiction feature competition at the 2026 Montclair Film Festival, the New Jersey festival has announced in its full winners list.

Pegah Ahangarani's "Rehearsals for a Revolution" took the Bruce Sinofsky Award in the documentary feature competition. The special jury prize in that category went to "One in a Million," a documentary by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes.

The festival spread its honors generously this year, which is one way of saying almost everyone went home with something.

Who won the juried competitions?

The Future/Now competition, devoted to emerging voices, produced two winners: Stephanie Ahn's "Bedford Park" and William D. Caballero's "TheyDream" shared the honors and the $5,000 Mark Urman award for filmmaking.

The short film competitions produced three winners:

• K. Xian Ming Yu's "I See You in the Flood"
• Mars Verrone's "Buckskin"
• Jeannette Louie's "Us Being Epic"

A Junior Jury prize went to "Mouse," directed by Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson. Senzo Ueno received a special jury prize for excellence in cinematography for his work on Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Look Back." A Kore-eda film winning a cinematography prize is the kind of result that surprises nobody and pleases almost everyone.

What did audiences choose?

The audience awards split along genre lines. Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine" won the audience award for fiction feature, confirming that the "In Bruges" playwright's drawing power survives the transition from stage to screen crowd.

Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor's "My NDA" won the audience award for documentary feature. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's "All of a Sudden" took best of world cinema, and Steven Leckart's "An Unknown Substance" won for best short film.

The audience slate leans international, with jury winner Lee and audience favorite Hamaguchi both hailing from East Asia's most celebrated arthouse traditions.

What did the festival say?

"Congratulations to our award winners for their outstanding work," Montclair Film artistic director Tom Hall said in a statement. "We are incredibly grateful to all of the artists who shared their films with our audiences at this year's festival. The connection these films forged with our festival audiences created an incredible atmosphere of conversation, connection and community."

Hall added: "We are so honored to have been given the opportunity to bring these films to our screens, and look forward to continuing our support of these films in our cinemas and in our community throughout the coming year."

That last commitment matters beyond ceremony. The festival has promised to keep programming the winning films in Montclair's cinemas throughout the coming year, which gives the awards practical weight rather than mere trophy value.

For Lee Chang-dong, whose previous features include some of the most admired works in contemporary Korean cinema, the fiction prize adds another festival laurel. For the smaller films in the shorts and Future/Now strands, a Montclair win now comes with continued exhibition, the rarest currency in independent film.