A short film about a couple’s never-ending love while dealing with the ravages of a terminal illness won best picture Sunday at the third annual Mount Gretna International Film Festival.
Also a winner at the renowned Sundance Film Festival, the 15-minute animated film titled “Living with a Visionary” was awarded the Vita Maxima, or Best in Show, prize during the two-day short film festival, which is held during the the Mount Gretna Outdoor Art Show, now in its 52nd year.
Los Angeles-based filmmaker Stephen P. Neary’s passion project, which is based on a true story, is a “soulful, bittersweet reflection on John’s 50-year marriage to Diana, an art curator grappling with Parkinson’s. As Diana’s medication besets her with vivid, often beautiful hallucinations, John, now her caregiver, adapts to her imaginary world.”
This project became personal for Neary, an animator whose credits include working as a story boarder on the 2025 Oscar-winning animated feature film “KPop Demon Hunters,” after he read John’s story in “The New Yorker” magazine.
“It’s been such a long journey to make this film,” Neary said in a telephone interview. “I was working on it for like four years in a shed in my backyard. I’m so happy to finally share it with people and to have it connect with audiences. I’m just overjoyed.”
There’s a certain universal appeal with this story, according to Vicki Deitzler who, along with her husband Michael, son Austin, and dear friends Ed and Jean Arnold, selected this film over the other six short works that took top honors in their respective genres.
Mt.GIFF was inspired by the Deitzler’s other son, Michael Evan Deitzler, who always wanted to have a film festival in his beloved Mount Gretna but passed away before seeing his dream become reality.
“We loved the animation of it. We loved the heart of it. We thought it was such a beautiful story to share and it showed something real like that happened in reference to the pandemic, in reference to things that really happened,” Vicki told LebTown after Sunday’s awards ceremony. “In the end you saw the couple that it was about. So it was a true story. There were so many things that we liked that really just fit together in this film.”
Already working two jobs as a full-time animator and full-time father, Neary would dive into this project, he said, after his children were put to bed. Besides finding time to work on it, the process to create the animation was a labor of love.
“It was all hand drawn on paper, just one frame at a time, and then scanned into a computer. So it was, you know, usually I work all day on a computer and I draw into the computer and this was a real labor of love to just sit down and put pencil to paper,” Neary said. “So I was so happy that I got to make it this way.”
His sister Annie attended the festival and accepted the award on his behalf. She described how Stephen became driven to bring this couple’s love story to life.
“Stephen just always reads the magazine because my dad always read the magazine. And then he saw it and was really captured by it, especially because the pandemic was still going on. And he was just determined to animate it himself,” she told LebTown. “He thought, ‘No big studio is going to do this, but I want to do it justice.’ And he did. It won a jury award at Sundance and he’s had it at some other film festivals, I think in Santa Barbara and Indianapolis. He’s trying to get as many people to see it as possible.”
Although the film currently isn’t online, it will be in the near future, according to Neary.
“We’ve been really, really lucky to have this film finally have some legs and we hope it can just keep reaching audiences. We’re hoping it’s going to be online. It looks like the New York Times’ opt-docs picked it up,” he said. “So they’re going to have it online sometime before the end of this year. But in the meantime, we’re so happy that audiences get to see it in person. I think the best way to watch movies is with a crowd of people.”
Festival director Claire de Boer said 82 short films were entered into the 2026 film festival, including nine from countries including Australia, France and India.
Of the 38 that were selected by a panel of film jurists, three hail from Lebanon County – including “Super Savers,” which won first place in the high school category and audience favorite within its genre, beating five other films submitted by high school students.
The film is the work of Soleil Jackson, a 2026 Cedar Crest graduate who will attend Point Place University this fall to study film. “Super Savers,” which was filmed at her parents’ Lebanon-based supermarket, tells what happens when “three burglars target a rare-cereal-box collectible, and three kids turn a grocery store into the ultimate battleground.”
“I wrote the characters based on my friends and I kind of just wanted us to have a really fun experience and make something that we were proud of,” said film fest newcomer Jackson, who also noted the film is inspired by the hijinks of the “Home Alone” franchise.
Emily Light, another first-timer, was featured in the animation division with her film “The Cereal Killer.” It was the first year for the animation division to be featured at this year’s festival, and the 23-year-old Myerstown resident’s work is based on a concept she created as a child.
The premise of the film involves “four robots trying to solve who amongst themselves killed their cereal.” The film was one of six to be shown in the new addition to the fest featuring animated films.
“Those characters that were in the film, I’ve had since I was like a little kid. And I made comics of them growing up. I had made ‘The Cereal Killer’ as a comic when I was in middle school,” Light said. “It was this comic that I’ve always had and when I was in college, my co-director, who unfortunately wasn’t able to make it today, was like, ‘Hey, what if you turned that comic into an animated movie?’ And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do that. I’m going to do that right now.’”
The final Lebanon County entry in the festival was another chapter from Lebanon-based Erik Soulliard’s horror series “Diakonia.” This chapter, titled “The Watchers,” is about Silas, who possesses the unsettling gift of discernment, or the ability to see dead people. Soulliard’s film won the first-ever top award in the Pennsylvania filmmakers’ category, and that prize was accepted by his father since Erik was unable to attend the festival.
Soulliard is a director, producer, editor, writer, and owner of Creativity Films, based in Lebanon. He told LebTown last year he had plans to seek a distributor for his work.
Read More: (Aug. 2025) Lebanon County shines at second annual international film festival in Mount Gretna
Category awards were presented for each of the top films within the seven divisions, and there were also craft and audience award winners in addition to the Vita Maxima. The film festival featured short movies of up to 20 minutes – up from 15 minutes from last year – across animation, comedy, documentary, drama, horror, high school, and Pennsylvania filmmakers.
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