The Sundance Film Festival Recap
The Grand Jury Prize for dramatic film went to “Padre Nuestro,” a darkly troubling moral thriller about Mexican illegals in New York that its director, Christopher Zalla, described as “the prodigal son meets Cain and Abel.” “Grace Is Gone,’ ‘ about a man (John Cusack, in schlump disguise) who drives his daughters to a Florida theme park instead of telling them their mother has been killed serving in Iraq, won the Audience Award for dramatic film, while its writer-director James C. Strouse was given the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award .
The Grand Jury Prize for documentary film went to “Manda Bala,” an inquiry into Brazilian corruption that somehow connects frog farms, kidnappings, and outer-ear reconstruction while remaining outrageously provocative. The film, which suggests a breakthrough fusion of Errol Morris and Quentin Tarantino, also won an Excellence in Cinematography award.
The tension at any Sundance — and 2007 has been no different — is always between art and commerce, commitment and genre, the indie community (whatever that is) and Hollywood. The acting award was emblematic of the divide, split between Tamara Podemski’s performance as a world-weary Native American in “Four Sheets to the Wind” and Jess Weixler playing a teenage girl with a nasty sexual mutation in the horror-comedy “Teeth.” Weixler arrived late for the ceremonies, having had to disembark a plane bound for her next job.
Strenuously anti-Oscar, the Sundance awards featured an onstage DJ to set the mood, casual clothes on everyone, and speeches that were impromptu, heartfelt, and occasionally incomprehensible. “I wrote a couple of names down on my Blackberry — how lame is that?” said “Manda Bala” director Jason Kohn before launching into an endearingly random litany of cast, crew, and agents.
By contrast, winners in other competitions were marked by an awareness of political quandaries and hard-won victories. “Enemies of Happiness,” about an Afghani woman running for her country’s parliament, won the World Cinema Jury Prize for documentary film, while “Sweet Mud” won the World Cinema dramatic film competition for its story of madness and loyalty on an Israeli kibbutz.
The documentary jurors awarded a Special Jury Prize to Charles Ferguson’s merciless dissection of the war in Iraq, “No End in Sight.” In his acceptance speech, the director thanked “my Iraq crew and bodyguards in Baghdad” and said he had “tried to make a film about policy and facts.”
The audience awards for international films were less rigorous. David Sington’s “In the Shadow of the Moon,” about the Apollo missions, won the World Cinema Audience Award for documentary, while the dramatic award was given to a popular favorite, “Once,” a scruffy musical romance set in Dublin.
There was a family vibe to many of the acceptances. Moms and dads were thanked as both spiritual and financial investors, and many of them were present at the ceremony. With the audience award winner for documentary, “Hear and Now,” the parents came onstage, since Irene Taylor Brodsky’s film is about her mother and father receiving cochlear implants and experiencing the world of sound after six decades of deafness.
Married filmmaking couples, a longstanding indie tradition, were also present. “Grace Is Gone” director Strouse was accompanied to the podium by his pregnant wife/co producer Galt Niederhoffer, and when Sean Fine and a teary Andrea Nix Fine accepted the directing award for their documentary “War/Dance,” about Ugandan child refugees, the husband noted “This is actually a lot like our wedding. Andrea cried the whole time.”
