[Ancapistani]

My guess is that they focused on the focal point of the image - the face, and especially the eyes - and didn't try to pick apart the whole image.

The white smudges in the center/top, and the yellow glow on the top of the left side seem like artifacts of a manual development process. That's likely something that would interest a photography judge - maybe the judge(s) here were just biased toward experimental analog processing and was therefore blind to the issues we immediately see?