AND WHAT REMAINS recieved its 5th award at 43rd annual WorldFest Houston. This is the 3rd longest running independent film festival in the US, and the Platinum Remi the best award in the short documentary category.

In their latest Fast Company column (Dec 2009/Jan 2010) Dan and Chip Heath, authors of the NY Times bestseller “Made To Stick,” (www.madetostick.com) discuss how the Aggrieva movies are a “sticky” approach to Ethics and Compliance Training.

“Made to Stick” was included in the “100 Best Business Books of All Time” and espouses six principles of sticky ideas: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories.

http://www.fastcompany.com/madetostick

An article in the November 2009 issue of the ACC Docket, a professional journal of the Association of Corporate Counsel, titled “Making Training Effective by Making it Sticky,” reveals the impact the movies had on the employees at BearingPoint, Inc. Download the pdf here

One employee stated “I’ve actually found myself looking forward to the next episode much in the same way you would a television series. Even through the humor, though, the messages are clear.”

The facilitators of the training found out that by the fourth episode “almost 2,000 people had taken the training module before its availability was even announced. We queried and found that a number of people had set calender reminders for our soft launches.” And this all for training films, something that most employees around the country dread having to sit through.

Reprinted with permission of the authors and the Association of Corporate Counsel as it originally appeared: “Making Training Effective by Making it Sticky,” ACC Docket 27, no. 9 (November 2009): 46-55. Copyright © 2009 the Association of Corporate Counsel. All rights reserved. Legal resources such as this are available to members at no charge. If you are interested in joining ACC, please go to www.acc.com, call 202.293.4103, ext. 360, or email membership@acc.com

An invitation to screen at the Anchorage International Film Festival makes 30 Official Selections to date. The festival takes place Dec 4 -17 in Anchorage, Alaska.

Over the weekend in Seattle, the short non-fiction film was awarded Best Film at the Damah Film Festival. The 1st place prize was decided by a combination of audience voting and a jury of Hollywood industry professionals including producers Howard Kazanjian (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), Ralph Winter, (X-Men, Wolverine), Stephen McEveety, (Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ). The screening and award ceremony took place at the Experience Music Museum. Director Marc Havener received $5000 and will be flown to Hiroshima, Japan on Dec. 9 to screen the film at Damah Japan, a sister film festival.

The film will have it’s International Premiere at the 17th Raindance Film Festival in London and will be in the company of many high profile films. This festival, described by Variety as “the UK’s premiere independent film festival” was listed in Variety’s “50 Unmissable Film Festivals”. It invited only 17 shorts from the USA.

“This triumvirate of Brit fests (Edinburgh/London/Raindance) make uneasy bedfellows, barely acknowledging each other’s existence, yet serving similar constituencies. Early-autumn Raindance, the love child of provocateur Elliot Grove, caters to the grittier, weirder end of indiedom and has a particular penchant for rock ‘n’ roll-themed pics. Despite its Cinderella status, it attracts an unusually large share of industry support.”

During the DC Shorts Film Festival Awards Brunch on Sunday afternoon in Washington DC, AND WHAT REMAINS was awarded the Festival Director’s Choice . A program of 100 films was culminated from over 700 submissions with AWR being deemed the festival director’s (Jonahtan Gann) favorite. During the ceremony, Gann stated that sometimes he’ll watch a submission on DVD and like the film, but when he sees it again in the theater, he won’t like it as much the second time. As for AWR: “I cried the first time I saw it, and then when I watched it in the theater last night, I ran to the back where my sister was sitting and gave her a big hug.”

The film played to sold out audiences and showed 5 times at the E Street Cinema Theaters in downtown DC, including the Best of the Fest screening on Thursday Sep 17.