This week, Where The Shadows Wait added two major honors to its growing list of accolades:
Award of Excellence — Special Jury Mention
Winner — Best Thriller
at IndieX Film Fest in Los Angeles — one of the most competitive indie festivals in the city where new voices break through every year.
What makes this moment special isn’t just the trophies.
It’s the recognition of craft.
@darkmonarchfilms Another one. Award of Excellence — Special Jury Mention. Every day the momentum gets louder. Dark Monarch Films is just getting started. 🖤👁🗨 @indiexfest #WhereTheShadowsWait #FilmFestival #IndieFilm #DMF ♬ original sound - Dark Monarch Films
It’s the fact that a film made independently, outside of the traditional system, is now consistently outperforming expectations, screening globally, and stacking wins across festivals in New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, Serbia, Asia, and beyond.
It’s the fact that a story created by a Chicago-born filmmaker — with no studio backing, no gatekeeper approval, no big-budget machine — continues to resonate wherever it screens.
This isn’t luck.
This is momentum.
And momentum is the real greenlight.
Because every award, every selection, every laurel is proof of what we’ve been saying from day one:
Independent doesn’t mean small. Independent means unstoppable.
These wins also push Where The Shadows Wait further into the global conversation — building leverage for distribution, sponsorship, platforms, and partnerships as we enter the next phase of the Dark Monarch Films slate.
We’re just getting started.
Thank you to the IndieX jury for seeing the vision, the cast for giving everything on screen, and to everyone following this journey as Dark Monarch Films becomes exactly what it set out to be:
A global storytelling studio. Built independently. Built publicly. Built with momentum.
Onward.