As the 10th annual GlobeDocs Film Festival wrapped up Sunday, the votes were tallied for the Audience Awards. After each screening, viewers were given the chance to champion their favorites by rating the documentaries on a five-point scale.
This year, the prizewinners were two local projects: “Recovery City,” directed by Lisa Olivieri, and “Another Stab at Life,” directed by Alex Lopez.
“Recovery City” follows four women in Worcester working every day to fight the stigma surrounding substance-abuse disorder and recovery.
After the film’s GlobeDocs screening, Olivieri, who lives in Watertown and teaches video and photography classes at Natick High School, took the stage alongside her four subjects to applause. “We’re really bonded, like a little band on the road,” Olivieri said of the group.
Lopez, who lives in Haverhill, had already received rejections from three other film festivals when he learned that “Another Stab at Life,” his directorial debut, was accepted to premiere at GlobeDocs. The short film is a character study of Lopez’s lifelong friend Anthony Fertitta, who suffered a stab wound to the head on a Boston South Station platform in 2015.
Fertitta, who Lopez grew up with in Foxborough, went on to spend two months at Massachusetts General Hospital and then nine more in rehab and therapies. Today, as he declares in the documentary, he is back to nearly “100 percent again.”
“Recovery City” and “Another Stab at Life” joined a third winner at this year’s festival: “Lighthouse,” from Boston College junior Lola Mei Ellis. The short film — which spotlights an organization supporting widowed women in Tamil Nadu, India — was the winner of the Emerging Filmmaker Contest for directors ages 18 through 25.
To capture the footage, Ellis flew into Chennai, and then drove seven hours along the southeast coast to Nagapattinam. She shot for a week and a half and spent about two months editing.
“Seeing the poverty firsthand was very hard,” she said, adding that she worked with a translator to get past the language barrier.
All three filmmakers discussed the joy of watching their work with an audience.
Fertitta, whom Lopez describes as “the most positive, outgoing person,” even yelled out from his seat mid-premiere to joke about a disc golf throw he makes onscreen.
For Olivieri, the most exciting part of the experience has been seeing viewers reach out to her subjects after screenings to seek advice about loved ones struggling with addiction.
It is crucial that people “feel safe to ask questions and for help,” the director said. “Recovery should be happening out loud.”
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