A French short film about a young woman pulled into the world of cockfighting has won the first tournament held by Plink, a streaming platform for independent filmmakers run from Fort Mill.
“Beaks,” directed by Xavier Demoulin, took the Plink Season 1 Championship after a single elimination bracket of nine independent films that ended Oct. 26. Viewers decided every matchup, and under Plink’s rules a vote counted only if the viewer had watched both films.
“Roll Pin Punch,” a mixed martial arts drama by Debbie Vu of IronWorx Media in Durham, North Carolina, finished as runner up and took the tournament’s Audience Choice honor.
Plink founder Matthew Morales, a Marine Corps veteran, launched the platform in September. He is now taking entries for a second tournament and said filmmakers from Fort Mill, Tega Cay and across York County are welcome to compete.
A Champion With Festival Credentials
“Beaks,” released in France as “Becs et ongles,” runs about 22 minutes. The film follows a young woman in northern France, where cockfights remain legal, who must send her father’s last rooster into the ring to raise money and pay off his debts.
The film arrived at Plink with a major prize already behind it. In February, it won the Narrative Shorts Grand Jury Prize at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles, where jurors praised it as a story about grief and the struggle to move on, set in a cockfighting world that operates on the edge of the law.
Demoulin said in an email that he was honored to be the first winner of the Plink award.
“I found the selected films to be very powerful and of an exceptionally high standard,” Demoulin said.
He said the tournament’s format, which builds in a public vote and lets the audience engage with the films, “is a unique and original concept that I have never encountered before.”
“On behalf of the entire team, thank you for the selection; we are sincerely honored by this award,” he said.
In an earlier note to Morales, Demoulin was more direct. “I am so happy ‘Beaks’ has won the tournament,” he wrote. “The other films were so good. I feel lucky to win.”
How the Voting Works
Each filmmaker on Plink runs what Morales calls a network, with channels, shows, seasons and episodes, plus full cast and crew credits, laid out the way a television network would be.
Filmmakers can also enter their work in free tournaments where two films go head to head and the audience decides which one advances. The requirement that voters watch both films is what separates Plink from popularity contests, Morales said.
“So the winner is picked by people who watched, not by whoever has the most followers,” he said.
Season 1 carried no cash prize. According to Plink’s tournament page, every entrant received an Official Selection laurel, with a new laurel for each round a film survived. The platform plans to offer cash prize tournaments once its payment system is in place.
Built by Directing AI
Morales said the idea grew out of a problem he saw firsthand. Every year, thousands of filmmakers finish a short film or a television pilot and cannot find an audience, he said. Big festivals accept less than one percent of submissions, according to Morales, and most films end up on YouTube or sitting on a hard drive.
Morales won best film at a 48 Hour Film Festival competition and had several television show concepts of his own with no outlet for them.
“I had script after script for TV shows and nowhere they could actually be found,” Morales said. “So I built the place myself.”
He has no coding background. Morales said he designed and built Plink by directing artificial intelligence tools.
The Crowd Picks the Runner Up
“Roll Pin Punch” lost the final but still won over the audience. Vu made the film with almost no dialogue so her parents could follow every moment, Morales said, and she wrote the fight scene for her father, a longtime fan of Jackie Chan movies.
Best Pilot Tournament Open Now
Plink’s second tournament, Best Pilot, is open to anyone who has made the first episode of a series. Entry is free. Entries close Nov. 13, and the bracket runs Nov. 16 to Dec. 14.
Best Pilot winners receive Writer Pro subscriptions from Celtx, and Plink’s Best Series tournament, which opens to entries Dec. 15, carries prizes from Shot Lister, iPitch.tv, Saturation and FilmLocal.”
The full Season 1 bracket is available at plink.video/tournaments/plink-season-1-championship, and entry information is at plink.video.
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Thomas Hyslip lives in Tega Cay with his wife and daughter. After 27 years in the U.S. Army and Federal Law Enforcement, he retired to pursue his passion for teaching. Tom is now an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of South Florida. In 2 short years he has won 10 awards from the South Carolina Press Association, including first place in column writing, education beat reporting and best podcast.
