The Butler and the Ball won the award for Best Youth – 18 at the 2021 Alder International Short Film Festival, an annual competitive film festival held in the heart of Chicago. The awards ceremony can be viewed here.

Oscar-nominated actress Adriana Barraza was also presented with the Alder Award at the ceremony. In 2006, she collaborated with director Alejandro G. Iñárritu in Babel, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Iñárritu also cast her as the mother of Gael García Bernal’s character in Amores perros, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The Butler and the Ball, an urban fairy tale about a lonely boy who enters a contest to become the new butler of a grieving, reclusive singer, was directed by eight-year-old Andrew Chan-Possemato, who wrote and produced it with Albert.