As awards season continues to heat up, the 46th Denver Film Festival honored Sterling K. Brown for his performance in Cord Jefferson’s film American Fiction.

Brown was honored at the festival with the Excellence in Acting Award last week. Brown plays Clifford Ellison, the gay brother of Jeffrey Wright’s Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Sterling also participated in a conversation with Larry Wilmore about the film after the film’s Nov. 11 screening.

American Fiction has been wowing audiences at the festivals it’s screened at, including at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Jefferson also won the Breakthrough Director Award at the festival. It also won the much-lauded Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award.

The film follows Wright’s character, a writer who is annoyed with the publishing world profiting from Black stereotypes and decides to flip the script to his advantage. According to the official synopsis:

AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson’s hilarious directorial debut, which confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

The film also stars Tracee Ellis Ross, Leslie Uggams, John Ortiz and Adam Brody. The film is slated to come to theaters on Dec. 22.