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The Atlantis Awards In a time where it feels like everything is underwater, we are dedicated to finding some of those buried treasures and help bring them into the light.

“If we’re going wide, then go wide. If we’re going in, then go in.” — Liam CalvertOur newest Atlantis Artist Spotlight t...
01/10/2026

“If we’re going wide, then go wide. If we’re going in, then go in.” — Liam Calvert
Our newest Atlantis Artist Spotlight turns the camera toward A Night Like This director Liam Calvert.
TAKE THE SWING looks beyond the finished film and into the filmmaker behind it: Calvert’s beginnings in editing, the leap into his first feature, the value of a small collaborative crew, the choices that survived limited time and resources, and the moments that became more interesting precisely because they weren’t planned.
There’s the bus scene that nearly lost a crucial angle. The silent-disco kiss that was supposed to have an alternate take—until the first version gave Calvert goosebumps at the monitor. The environmental details that range from pure accident to consciously embraced location finds to production design built specifically for the film. And throughout, a philosophy emerges: prepare carefully, take the swing, and leave enough room for the people around you to make the movie better.
The Spotlight also looks forward—to what Calvert learned from completing his first feature, the imposter syndrome that didn’t magically disappear afterward, and the next project now beginning to take shape.
Read the Artist Spotlight:
https://theatlantisawards.com/liam-calvert/
And for the companion deep dive into the film itself:
LIMINAL UNTIL EIGHT — A Case Study of A Night Like This (2025)
https://theatlantisawards.com/a-night-like-this-2025/
Two pieces, two different questions:
How does the film work?
And what kind of filmmaker made it?

Max Hegewald’s film begins with division before it has even introduced its family: a worm, a falling knife, a newborn cr...
30/09/2026

Max Hegewald’s film begins with division before it has even introduced its family: a worm, a falling knife, a newborn cry, and a cut that withholds the decisive instant.
From there, Free at Heart builds its drama through language and visibility.
Names arrive too early or too late. Family roles are offered, withheld, reclaimed, and imposed. Private knowledge spreads through a town without a traceable route. A drawing preserves attention. A photograph removes context. A rumor becomes jurisdiction.
Our new Case Study, “What the Picture Cannot Know,” follows the film’s editing, performance, cinematography, recurring bird imagery, the changing meaning of privacy, and the legal framework that eventually enters the story.
It also looks at the project’s earlier Blackbird incarnation — including its documented twin-brother version and Hegewald’s explicit Parent Trap / Doppelgänger foundation.
Read the full bilingual Case Study:
https://theatlantisawards.com/free-at-heart-2025/

What happens when you analyze a film before asking its filmmaker what any of it means?Wilma Casal’s Ancestral Shadows co...
29/09/2026

What happens when you analyze a film before asking its filmmaker what any of it means?
Wilma Casal’s Ancestral Shadows communicates almost entirely through movement, architecture, music and gesture. So Atlantis tried an experiment.
We completed a close reading of the film without consulting Casal’s statement or official synopsis, then froze that interpretation and invited her to respond.
What followed was more interesting than a question of whether we were “right.”
Casal described the film beginning with the image of a marionette — a body directed by invisible inherited strings — and spoke about gendered expectations, body language, ancestral pressure and the search for a location capable of carrying generations of history.
Some of that closely intersected with what we had seen.
Some of it changed what we saw.
And some of it revealed meanings our first reading had never recovered at all.
The expanded study preserves both stages of the encounter: first, what the finished film communicated without explanation; then, what happened when another perspective entered the room.
Because a film without dialogue does not leave the audience without language. It asks us to bring some of our own.
And interpretation does not have to end when someone else sees something differently.
Sometimes that is precisely where the next movement begins.
Because It Could Not Stop — A Case Study of Ancestral Shadows
Directed and choreographed by Wilma Casal
https://theatlantisawards.com/ancestral-shadows-2025/

For Unabomber, the most revealing question may not be what Ted Kaczynski believed—but who gets to decide what his words ...
26/09/2026

For Unabomber, the most revealing question may not be what Ted Kaczynski believed—but who gets to decide what his words mean.
Janus Metz’s film turns interpretation into a contest. Henry Murray records and classifies. The FBI reads language as evidence. Ted learns to identify and exploit another man’s vulnerabilities. And, eventually, the film itself begins selecting, arranging, and interpreting the historical record.
Our new Atlantis Case Study, “The Right to Define,” follows that mechanism through Jacob Tremblay and Russell Crowe’s central confrontation, the film’s evolving crosscut structure, Marco Beltrami’s extraordinary The White Whale cue, and the uncomfortable satisfaction of watching Ted defeat a man who has abused his authority—without allowing that victory to excuse what Ted later chooses to become.
The film gives young Ted his moment of liberation.
Then it keeps cutting.
Read the full Case Study:
https://theatlantisawards.com/unabomber-2026/

Two strangers. One winter night in London. One rule: whatever happens between them ends at 8:00 a.m.Liam Calvert’s A Nig...
24/09/2026

Two strangers. One winter night in London. One rule: whatever happens between them ends at 8:00 a.m.

Liam Calvert’s A Night Like This keeps returning to things designed to be temporary — buses, bridges, closing bars, borrowed stories, private soundscapes, and a deadline meant to keep two people from becoming anything more.

Then the meanings start to change.

A childhood warning becomes someone else’s courage. A song turns into a destination. An old coin passes from one lonely person to another. The same bridge appears twice, but the second time someone has entered the frame.

For the new Atlantis Case Study, “Liminal Until Eight,” we look at the film’s construction through liminality, apophenia, recurring language and locations, the 200-hour friendship rule, sound perspective, performance, editing, and the carefully choreographed movement from isolation toward connection.

Maybe London is only full of old signs and coincidences.

Maybe a lottery poster is just a lottery poster.

Call it apophenia if you like. Oliver would.

Read the full case study at TheAtlantisAwards.com
https://theatlantisawards.com/a-night-like-this-2025/

Lavender Men begins with a stage manager taking control of the story.Then the story starts answering back.Directed by Lo...
22/09/2026

Lavender Men begins with a stage manager taking control of the story.

Then the story starts answering back.

Directed by Lovell Holder and adapted with Roger Q. Mason from Mason’s stage play, the film gives Taffeta the power to recast history, rebuild intimacy, interrupt scenes, change roles, and promise Abraham Lincoln and Elmer Ellsworth another ending.

But the deeper the fantasia goes, the less obedient it becomes.

Lincoln wants Taffeta to intervene — to save the man he loves and prevent history from repeating itself. Ellsworth wants something different: the right to keep the act that gives his life meaning, even knowing where it leads.

Around that conflict, Lavender Men builds an unusually elastic visual language. The camera glides, searches, rocks, tightens and steadies as the rules of the fantasia change. Saturated theatrical color gives way to contemporary spaces. Taffeta moves from author to performer to spectator to scenery — while the two men they created gradually become something more complicated than vessels for someone else’s longing.

The final movement isn’t about Taffeta losing control.

It’s about realizing that someone else’s love story cannot be forced to answer a need it was never capable of fulfilling.

Our new Atlantis Case Study, “When the Story Answers Back,” looks at the film’s narrative construction, cinematography, performance, editing, theatrical lineage, and the way an imagined romance gradually acquires needs of its own.

🔗 Full Case Study:
https://theatlantisawards.com/lavender-men-2025/

What if the horror isn’t that civilization stops working — but that it keeps working for someone else?Alexandre Aja’s Th...
20/09/2026

What if the horror isn’t that civilization stops working — but that it keeps working for someone else?

Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is full of familiar systems: roads, guns, radios, locks, warning signals, even a family trailer that begins as shelter. None of them become meaningless in the desert. Their danger comes from who controls them, what information they provide, and what the Carters assume their familiar functions mean.

Our new Atlantis Case Study follows that mechanism from the first wrong turn through the film’s use of geography, sound, communication, objects, and adaptation — including the moment the survivors finally begin building traps of their own.

Along the way: the walkie-talkie network, the gas station’s layered production design, tomandandy’s Western/electronic score, the enlarged trailer set, hybrid practical/VFX work, the nuclear test village, and the ways Doug’s transformation is more complicated than simply “pacifist becomes violent.”

The Road Goes Somewhere — A Case Study of The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Full spoilers.

🔗 Read the full study:
theatlantisawards.com/the-hills-have-eyes-2006/

Some films make grief visible by showing tears.The Surrender does something stranger: it turns grief into objects, bodie...
17/09/2026

Some films make grief visible by showing tears.

The Surrender does something stranger: it turns grief into objects, bodies, memories, music, and substitutes — then asks what happens when the living begin to mistake those things for the people they have lost.

Our latest Atlantis Case Study looks at Julia Max’s film through one recurring physical idea:

Grasping can stop the scene. It cannot bring the person back.

Across photographs, remembered conversations, ritual sacrifice, mirrored spaces, and the repeated return of “Of You,” the film gradually separates preserving a trace from demanding that the trace become recovery.

The result is a study of release that is not the same thing as destruction — because some things can remain.

All of You — A Case Study of The Surrender (2025)

Written by Joshua Allen
The Atlantis Awards

Full spoilers in the study.

https://theatlantisawards.com/the-surrender-2025/

“Form will never be the most exciting thing. It will always be psychology.” — Mathias BroeOur latest Atlantis Artist Spo...
16/09/2026

“Form will never be the most exciting thing. It will always be psychology.” — Mathias Broe

Our latest Atlantis Artist Spotlight is now live.

I had the chance to sit down with Sauna director Mathias Broe for a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, actors, editing, community, q***r cinema, the emotional core beneath his work, and what comes next.

What started as a discussion about Sauna gradually became something broader: how research can make a filmmaker more fearless, why psychology ultimately outranks formal cleverness, and how the same inner landscape can carry an artist from an intimate q***r drama to theatre, a children’s film, and whatever comes after.

The Movies Are Smarter Than You Are
An Artist Spotlight with Mathias Broe

Read the full Spotlight at theatlantisawards.com/mathias-broe/

“Because I Said So” — A Case Study of I Want Your S*x (2026)Gregg Araki’s I Want Your S*x is loud, funny, provocative, a...
15/09/2026

“Because I Said So” — A Case Study of I Want Your S*x (2026)

Gregg Araki’s I Want Your S*x is loud, funny, provocative, and extremely easy to read.

That clarity is part of what makes it work.

The latest Atlantis Case Study looks at how the film turns interpretation into choreography: characters name what an encounter means, and those definitions begin shaping blocking, costume, performance, and physical behavior.

But the same clarity has a cost.

Once the audience learns the film’s grammar, later revelations can begin to feel less like discoveries than confirmations — and some characters become more legible as functions than as people the story continues to follow.

The study also looks closely at Erika and Elliot’s shifting power dynamic, Apple’s role in exposing the mechanism’s limits, the film’s use of wardrobe and intimacy choreography, and the way I Want Your S*x itself frames the audience before the first scene begins.

Because I Said So — A Case Study of I Want Your S*x (2026)
Written by Joshua Allen

🔗 https://theatlantisawards.com/i-want-your-sex-2026/

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