This week, we’ve been calling our 2010 CINE Special Jury Award winners to notify them of their win. That’s a task that never gets old, frankly. We’ll be posting the complete list of winners soon – and it’s a remarkable crop, watch as many as you possibly can – but until then, we wanted to take a minute to explain what the Special Jury Award is, and why the recipients are so extraordinary.

CINE holds two competitions per year to select recipients of the CINE Golden Eagle Award. The Golden Eagle is bestowed based on the individual merits of the film, and not in competition with the other entries in its category; if a category has 100 entries, there can be 100 Golden Eagle winners or none, depending on the quality of the submissions, and to receive a Golden Eagle, a production must achieve excellence in all facets.

In January, CINE’s Board of Directors meets to select the best Golden Eagle Award-winning film of the previous year for each of CINE’s categories, which become the winners of the CINE Special Jury Award. From the hundreds of submissions that CINE received in 2009, these productions are the 30 (or so) best.

Soon we’ll post clips, pictures and links from the 2010 Special Jury Award recipients, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts about these wonderful films. If you want to see your name in those ranks, enter your production into our Spring 2010 Competition, and hopefully we’ll see you back here next year.