“I’m always grieving over my responsibility to the subject matter. I’m in there with cameras and then it blows up on the web and people want to know what it was for. Was it to just build my portfolio?”

The film that ended up winning the $25,000 grand prize for best video at the first annual Vimeo Awards was a gritty six-minute short that had also taken top honors in the documentary category. Last Minutes With Oden details the final hours of a three-legged dog and the transcendent mixture of anguish and gratitude experienced by his owner.

The first time I saw the film I was sitting in a friend’s office, surrounded by his coworkers. Within seconds, hemmed in by the desks of strangers, I began to weep openly. Something about the film’s raw beauty, the way it captures how the numinous and the mundane intermingle in our daily lives, made me want to share it with everyone I knew.