Sundance Film Festival

Last night, filmmakers and Festivalgoers crowded into the Park City Racquet Club to celebrate the close of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and to learn which films Festival juries and audiences had chosen for awards. Hosted by William H. Macy, the ceremony took its cue from the Festival’s Utah location and carried off a Western theme.



Juror and Sundance alum Quentin Tarantino presented the Festival’s Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic. Before presenting the award, he recalled the 1992 Awards Ceremony during which he did not win a prize for Reservoir Dogs, which premiered at Sundance that year. Then, Tarantino called the audience to celebrate all the filmmakers in the room and reminded the crowd that Sundance is all about the love of cinema.
Awarded to one of the 16 U.S. films in the Dramatic Competition, the 2008 Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River. The film tells the story of a desperate trailer mom and a Mohawk woman who team up to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States from Canada. Accepting the award, Hunt said, “Thanks to Sundance Institute because without these programmers, this film could easily have been lost....I believe in a universe of abundance and I believe that every filmmaker here will find their perfect audience.”
The Jury selected Tia Lesson and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water for top honors from the 16 films in the Documentary Competition of U.S. films. An aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, armed with a video camera, show what survival means when they are trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters and seize a chance for a new beginning. Presenting the award to Lesson and Deal, Juror Eugene Jarecki said, “It is with our pride and our outrage that the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary goes to Trouble the Water.”
In welcoming the crowd to the ceremony, Sundance Institute Executive Director Ken Brecher noted the important role that storytelling plays in the human experience. He quoted James Orbiniski, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the subject of the documentary Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma. “‘Stories, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do,’” Brecher qutoed Orbinski as saying. “‘We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we had better choose them well.’”
Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore saw the ’08 lineup as a sign of new things to come. “I feel like I’m witnessing a new era of independent film evolving before my very eyes,” he said. “This year, we’re witnessing the emergence of filmmakers we’ll hear from for a long time.”

Tallied throughout the 10 days of the Festival, Audience Awards are given to a film in the Dramatic and Documentary Competitions and are presented by Volkswagen of America, Inc.

The Audience Award: Documentary was presented to Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel, a look at America’s addiction to oil. Tickell is a man with a plan and a Veggie Van, who is taking on big oil, big government, and big soy to find solutions in places few people have looked.

The Audience Award: Dramatic was presented to The Wackness, directed by Jonathan Levine. During a sweltering New York summer, a troubled teenage drug dealer trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist, and in the process falls for the doctor’s daughter.

This marks the fourth year of the Festival’s World Cinema Competition. The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Jens Jonsson’s Swedish film King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen). An ostracized and bullied teenager who excels only in ping pong descends into an acrimonious struggle with his younger, more popular brother when the truth about their family history and their father surfaces over the course of their spring break.

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary was given to Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh and from the U.K. The film chronicles French artist Philippe Petit’s daring dance on a wire suspended between New York’s Twin Towers and his subsequent arrest for what would become known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

The World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic was given to the Jordanian film Captain Abu Raed, directed by Amin Matalqa. The first feature film to come out of Jordan in 50 years, Captain Abu Raed tells the story of an aging airport janitor who is mistaken for an airline pilot by a group of poor neighborhood children and whose fantastical stories offer hope for a sad, sometimes unchangeable, reality.

James Marsh’s Man on Wire received the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary in addition to receiving the World Cinema Jury Prize.

This year, for the first time, films screening in the World Cinema Competition were eligible for the same awards presented to the U.S. films in Competition. Following is the list of other awards presented last night:

Directing Award: Documentary - Nanette Burstein, American Teen Directing Award: Dramatic - Lance Hammer, Ballast
World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary - Nino Kirtadze, Durakovo: Village of Fools
World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic - Anna Melikyan, Mermaid

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award - Alex Rivera and David Riker, Sleep Dealer
World Cinema Screenwriting Award - Samuel Benchetrit, I Always Wanted To Be a Gangster

Documentary Editing Award - Joe Bini, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award - Irena Dol, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary - Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring, Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic - Lol Crawley, Ballast
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary - al Massad, Recycle
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic - Askild Vik Edvardsen, King of Ping Pong

Jury members are given the option of awarding Special Jury Prizes to competition films they have designated as meriting special recognition. The Special Jury Prizes for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival are:

Special Jury Prize: Documentary - Lisa F. Jackson, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic for The Spirit of Independence - Chusy Haney-Jardine, Anywhere, USA

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic for Work by an Ensemble Cast - Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald, Brad Henke, Choke
World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic - Ernesto Contreras, Párpados Azules (Blue Eyelids)

The Festival’s shorts lineup presented 84 films, all of which were eligible for jury prizes. my olympic summer, directed by Daniel Robin, and Sikumi (On the Ice), directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean both received the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking. The jury also presented the International Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking to Soft, directed by Simon Ellis. Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking went to: Aquarium, directed by Rob Meyer; August 15th, directed by Xuan Jiang; La Corona (The Crown), directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega; Oiran Lyrics, directed by Ryosuke Ogawa; Spider, directed by Nash Edgerton; Suspension, directed by Nicolas Provost, and W., directed by The Vikings. The 2008 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Awards were presented by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Earlier in the week, the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards were presented. Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer received the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award and is presented to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.

The winners of the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards are Alejandro Fernandez Almendras from Chile for Huacho; Braden King from the United States, for Here; Aiko Nagatsu from Japan, for Apoptosis; and Radu Jude from Romania, for The Happiest Girl in the World. Now in its twelfth year, the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award was created to honor and support emerging filmmakers from four global regions.

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