Jason Reitman, Elizabeth Gabler, and Minhal Baig to Serve as Jury for 2025 Sony Future Filmmaker Awards

"Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" director Justin Chadwick will return as the chair for the award ceremony's jury.

The 2025 Sony Future Filmmaker Awards, which is returning for its third edition next June, has announced the filmmakers who will work to select budding filmmaking talent to participate in workshops, screenings, and networking events that will help launch their careers.

Creo, the not-for-profit group that organizes the awards, along with Sony announced that director Minhal Baig (“We Grown Now“), president of 3000 Pictures Elizabeth Gabler (“Where the Crawdads Sing“), and Oscar-nominee Jason Reitman (“Saturday Night“) will serve on the jury to select the 2025 recipients. Returning to the awards for the third year as jury chair is filmmaker Justin Chadwick (“Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom”).

The panel will work to shortlist a group of aspiring filmmakers from around the globe, and the selected filmmakers will then get the chance to fly to Los Angeles and participate in a five-day program on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City between June 2-6, 2025. The filmmakers will sit through workshops, get advice from expert speakers and other top professionals, and get backstage access courtesy of Sony Pictures executives.

Some of the topics in keynote discussions will come from major cinematographers, talent agencies, and other sessions on using the latest tech, advances in animation, film scoring, and navigating music rights. It will all culminate in an awards ceremony on June 5, where four category winners will be revealed and will be rewarded with cash prizes and Sony digital imaging equipment.

Creo and Sony will also award the Sustainability Prize to reward a film that communicates on key themes linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, as well as an award for Future Format, which will recognize short films shot exclusively on a smartphone.

The jury for the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards will be evaluating on four categories in which filmmakers can enter: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Animation, and Student.

Anyone can apply to enter, submissions are free, and the deadline for entry is December 12, 2024. A group of 30 filmmakers will then be announced for the 2025 class on April 29, 2025.

“Last year’s shortlist selection illuminated the talent of 30 filmmakers who transformed their visions into captivating stories, bringing them into the heart of moviemaking in Los Angeles where they gained invaluable awareness of our ever-evolving industry,” Chadwick said in a statement. “With this year’s competition, we are looking for projects that hold the potential not only to change the lives of these filmmakers but also to provoke and compel us as viewers to alter our outlooks. I am grateful to return for the third year as Chair and I speak for the jury when I say how excited we are to discover the creativity and passion which the 2025 competition will surely bring.”

For more information and further details of the categories of the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards 2025, please visit sonyfuturefilmmakerawards.com.