Winners
Immerse your ears in the best audio documentaries and storytelling since 2001, the winners of the Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition.
Counted: An Oakland Story
During 2017, a team of Snap Judgment producers followed every homicide in Oakland, CA for the entire year.
- 2018
- 56:30
- Adizah Eghan
- Anna Sussman
- Shaina Shealy
- Jonathan Jones
Change Intolerance
In 2014, the province of British Columbia switched nearly 15,000 methadone patients to a new formulation of the drug called Methadose.
- 2019
- 51:18
- Garth Mullins
- Sam Fenn
- Lisa Hale
- Alexander B. Kim
- Ryan McNeil
Centenarians in Lockdown
When the 1918 flu pandemic broke out, Joe Newman was 5 years old. Today, he's 107. He lives in a community for seniors in Sarasota, Fla., with his fiancée, Anita Sampson.
Crosses in the Desert
Alvaro Enciso is a retired man who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He puts crosses in the exact places where dead migrant bodies have been found in the Sonoran desert.
- 2020
- 24:36
- Catalina May
- Martín Cruz
- Dennis Maxwell
Checking One's Levels
Winner of the 2022-23 Third Coast/RHDF Competition Best Documentary: Short Award, selected by Final Round Judges Stacia Brown, Sharon Mashihi, and Justine Tobiasz.
- 2023
- 04:34
- Talia Augustidis
- Eleanor McDowall
Children of Sodom and Gomorrah
Sodom and Gomorrah is a hellish place in Accra, Ghana, where children eke out a living on a scrap heap of discarded computers that the West no longer needs.
- 2011
- 52:35
- Jens Jarisch
- Sharon Davis
Crown the King: Red Takes Black
2012 ShortDocs Winner! One block from Adam Kampe's apartment sits the Capitol Pool Checkers Club where, each week, men with nicknames like the Hammer, the Pressure Man, and the Razor gather to trash talk over heated games of checkers.
- 2012
- 02:32
- Adam Kampe
The Color Is Black
Here is darkness, construed as manifestations of the color black through history, space, time, and in the natural world.
- 2004
- 05:34
- Jerome Schmidt
- Rick Moody
Cooler by the Lake
A classical composer, Stuart Brocklehurst, attempts to deal with his writer's block through environmental field recording.
- 2009
- 06:14
- Laura Vitale
- Rick Moody
Chicago's Gangster
Every July 22nd, a group of Chicagoans gather to memorialize the death of infamous and beloved bank robber John Dillinger, who spent a year evading the authorities and winning American hearts before he was shot dead in July, 1934.
- 2009
- 03:56
- Heather Radke
Chicago to Mexico, by Bus
Every week hundreds of people board coach buses in Chicago and travel to Mexico.
- 2014
- 11:47
- Linda Lutton
Come Back to Afghanistan
In the summer of 2002, 17-year-old Hyder Akbar traveled from California with his father to their home country of Afghanistan. He took a tape recorder along on the trip to record his thoughts and experiences.
- 2003
- 59:00
- Hyder Akbar
- Susan Burton
Carl, with an El
Carl Sandburg inspires a meditation on private worlds as we ride the El.
- 2009
- 02:45
- Neil Sandell
Couple Two Tree
A loving examination of the Chicagoan language by four non-etymologists.
- 2009
- 03:01
- Sean Cole
Capturing the Brief Life and Death of an Infant
Barch Levi Blum was born in late 2009 at Toronto's Mt. Sinai Hospital. He lived for ten minutes.
- 2010
- 06:15
- Mary Beth Kirchner
Corrections, Inc.
The corrections industry has become a $50-billion-a-year business and one of the strongest influences on criminal justice policy in America.
- 2002
- 49:55
- John Biewen
Can You Say Haa?
As a girl, Reena Katz learned one story about the history of Israel and the people who lived there. As she grew up, an interest in cartography and her father's rare books about Palestine prompted her to dig deeper to understand the landscape of the Middle East.
- 2003
- 14:25
- Reena Katz