By Delayna Earley
The Island News
The Beaufort International Film Festival has handed out a screenplay award for years.
This year, it carried a new name and a different kind of meaning.
During the 20th annual festival’s closing weekend, BIFF organizers renamed the longtime Best Screenplay honor the Jeff Evans Screenplay Award, memorializing The Island News and Lowcountry Weekly publisher Jeff Evans, who died suddenly in 2025.
“It made me burst into tears,” said Margaret Evans, his widow and current publisher of the two publications. “I was so touched when Ron Tucker told me they wanted to create this award.”
Festival director Ron Tucker said the award itself already existed, but the decision to attach Evans’ name to it was about permanence and keeping him connected to the part of the festival he helped build.
“We always had a Best Screenplay award,” Tucker said. “But the screenplay workshop was Jeff’s baby.”
A program Jeff built and loved
For many years, Jeff Evans wasn’t simply a familiar face at BIFF, he was a working part of the machinery that made it feel personal.
Margaret said Jeff served as director of the festival’s screenwriters workshop for much of BIFF’s run, collecting selected pages from screenwriters, organizing local readers and helping shape a live event where writers could hear their work performed aloud.
“It was a lot of work,” she said. “And Jeff loved doing it.”
Tucker said Evans became the point person for participating writers and helped grow that part of the festival steadily over time while also serving as a presenter in other categories and helping with the printed film guide.
And, Tucker added, Evans’ involvement wasn’t only what he did on stage.
It was also what his publications did for BIFF year after year.
The Island News and Lowcountry Weekly, he said, were key media partners, helping promote the festival and connect the community to it.
A tribute built into the night
Tucker said BIFF not only renamed the award, it redesigned it as a separate trophy and moved its presentation to the middle of the ceremony to give it more weight.
It was, he said, a way to make sure the audience understood why this award now exists in Evans’ name and why it will continue.
“Now forevermore,” Tucker said, “it will be the Jeff Evans Screenplay Award.”
For Margaret, the moment was both heavy and healing, part of what she described as an emotional week that was “happy-sad” in the way grief often is.
“For me, it was a very emotional week in a really good way,” she said. “I cried a lot, but I laughed a lot. And I felt Jeff’s spirit over all of it.”
She called the festival “therapeutic,” not because it erased the loss, but because it allowed space for it — surrounded by art, memory and community.
“There’s something about art, and especially film for me, that reaches into your heart and helps you face the most painful things,” she said. “It was a beautiful week.”
A name that stays
Margaret Evans said Jeff didn’t spend time talking himself up, even though BIFF was one of the places he felt most alive and most creatively himself.
“It was a real creative outlet for him,” she said. “When he got to spread his wings like this, it just made him so happy.”
Now, in a festival built on stories, his name is part of the annual script — read aloud, spoken from the stage, and carried forward.
“I’m so happy that Jeff has been memorialized in this way that will continue,” she said.
BIFF’s biggest year yet
The tribute also landed in a year when BIFF hit a new stride.
According to the Beaufort Film Society, the 20th annual festival ran six days, included 11 world premieres and 41 South Carolina premieres, and drew an average attendance of 250 people per screening.
Tucker said audiences were engaged, not just watching films, but showing up for filmmakers, asking questions and making visitors feel welcomed in Beaufort.
“All the movies played well and were well received,” he said. “Everything ran smoothly… and everybody was very complimentary of the whole operation, especially complimentary of the town.”
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
