Skip to content
Reading time: 2 minutes

Rumspringa, a feature screenplay by Marc Moody, has received the first-place award in the juried script competition at the recent University Film and Video Association (UFVA) conference at American University in Washington, D.C. Moody is an associate professor in film and screenwriting at the School of Communications in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

The term rumspringa refers to an Amish coming-of-age ritual, during which youth are allowed social freedom before officially joining the church. Moody’s screenplay follows two young Amish men from Pawnee City, Nebraska, who fall in love during rumspringa, and are subsequently ex-communicated from their Amish community.

An international organization of professors, scholars and film and video makers, UFVA provides opportunities to discuss and share ideas, evaluate creative work and monitor the developments in film/video technology, education, scholarship and artistic pursuits. It is also one of the principal U.S. academic organizations for studying media.

More on Marc Moody

Marc Moody

Moody graduated from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1983 with a bachelor of arts in drama. He went on to obtain his master’s degree in screenwriting from Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies and his MFA in film at Ohio University School of Film.

An award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter, he has received many awards including being a twice semi-finalist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship International Screenwriting Competition placing in the top 30 out of 6,730 submissions for his screenplay Union. He also has won numerous awards for his feature film Almost Normal, including the Phred Love Best Hawaiʻi Filmmakers Award at the Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival, and Best of Fest at the prestigious Breckenridge Film Festival.

Almost Normal has gone on to achieve international distribution in 6 countries, has aired on MTV and has achieved streaming distribution in 2013 for iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix Streaming among several other sites. He is currently writing a screenplay short for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Carson Film Series at The Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film with a shooting date for summer 2016.

—By Lisa Shirota

Back To Top