AFT Awards: Best Breakthrough Performance

This is the seventeenth category of the 9th Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them. Click here to see previous years of this category.

Honorable mentions:
Hannah Murray (Bridgend), Giulia Salerno (Misunderstood), Yanet Mojica (Sand Dollars), Joséphine Japy (Breathe), Lou de Laâge (Breathe)

The winner:
Jacob Tremblay (Room) truly inhabited the role of a boy who had never been outside of one small room, and demonstrated maturity and promise well beyond his few years.

Other nominees:
Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and RJ Cyler (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) were such vital parts of their film as two of the title characters, each so marvelously suited for their particular roles and their distinct perceptions of the world. Günes Sensoy (Mustang) demonstrated such an incredible sense of longing and dreaming for something more complex and rewarding than her lot in life, guiding her film through its miserable reality. Brooke Bloom (She’s Lost Control) kept her film’s title in check with a revealing and insightful lead performance.