Winners of the 10th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival Audience Award

Like the 10th Annual GlobeDocs Film Festival The votes for the Audience Awards were counted on Sunday. After each screening, viewers were given the opportunity to promote their favorites by rating the documentaries on a five-point scale.

This year’s award winners were two local projects: ‘Recovery City’, directed by Lisa Olivieri, and ‘Another Stab at Life’, directed by Alex Lopez.

“Recovery City” follows four women in Worcester who work every day to combat the stigma surrounding substance abuse and recovery.

After the GlobeDocs screening of the film, Olivieri, who lives in Watertown and teaches video and photography classes at Natick High School, took the stage alongside her four subjects to applause. “We’re really connected, like a little band on the road,” Olivieri said of the group.

Lopez, who lives in Haverhill, had already received rejections from three other film festivals when he heard that “Another Stab at Life,” his directorial debut, had been accepted to premiere at GlobeDocs. The short film is a character study of Lopez’s lifelong friend Anthony Fertitta, who suffered a stab wound to the head on a Boston South Station platform in 2015.

Fertitta, who Lopez grew up with in Foxborough, then spent two months at Massachusetts General Hospital and then another nine months in rehabilitation and therapies. Today, as he explains in the documentary, he is almost ‘100 percent’ again.

“Recovery City” and “Another Stab at Life” joined a third winner at this year’s festival: “Lighthouse” by Boston College junior Lola Mei Ellis. The short film – which spotlights an organization supporting widowed women in Tamil Nadu, India – was the winner of the Emerging Filmmaker Contest for directors aged 18 to 25.

To capture the footage, Ellis flew to Chennai and then drove seven hours along the southeast coast to Nagapattinam. She spent a week and a half shooting and about two months editing.

“It was very difficult to see the poverty with my own eyes,” she said, adding that she worked with a translator to overcome the language barrier.

All three filmmakers discussed the joy of watching their work with an audience.

Fertitta, who Lopez describes as “the most positive, outgoing person,” even shouted out of his seat halfway through the premiere to joke about a disc golf throw he makes on screen.

For Olivieri, the most exciting part of the experience is when viewers reach out to her subjects after the screenings to ask for advice about loved ones struggling with addiction.

It is crucial that people “feel safe to ask questions and ask for help,” the director said. “Recovery should happen out loud.”