Reportage and analysis by Howard Karren
It’s common at festivals for people to compare their overall quality from one year to another, but aside from jaded veterans, who really profits from that kind of evaluation? Far more important in the long run is the matter of how good each movie was individually, and this year at Sundance, there were plenty of standouts. There were certainly trends — fewer movies dealing with Iraq, stories pushing the envelope toward darker and darker material, such as self-cutting and mercy killing in Downloading Nancy, a Holocaust survivor turning her sons into sexual basket cases in Death in Love, and incest leading to murder in Savage Grace.
And then there are the awards. At Sundance there are essentially two types: audience awards, voted on by anyone who went to see the films, and jury awards, voted on by the juries selected anew each year by the festival‘s directors. Both types of awards apply to each of the categories in competition — Dramatic, Documentary, World Dramatic, and World Documentary. (The films screened under the rubrics Premieres, Spectrum, and Park City at Midnight, among others, are ineligible for awards.) The Shorts category, a launching pad for new filmmakers, is a world unto itself, though the winners and honorable mentions will not be names that are familiar to most Premiere.com readers. The ceremony itself is usually a poignant affair, filled with cheers and thanks and an occasionally humorous speech. This year it was hosted by the always-game William H. Macy at the Racquet Club in Park City, which was decorated like a Tex-Mex-themed senior prom, with giant green-lit saguaro cactus trees and a Wild West stage set. Most of the acceptances were short and sweet.
The World Documentary audience award — as well as the World Documentary Grand Jury Prize — went to Man on Wire, a feature about famed aerialist Philippe Petit, who accepted the prize with director James Marsh (from the UK), crowing to the crowd, “You have impeccable taste!” The rest of the World Documentary prizes were awarded by the jury: best cinematography went to Recycle, a Jordanian film that explores the life of a religious Muslim in the slums of the city of Zarqa; since the director, Mahmoud al Massad, was also the cinematographer, this award seemed to be an appropriate way of honoring the film itself. Best editing went to The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, from New Zealand, and best directing to Durakovo: Village of Fools. Oddly overlooked was the hilarious British memoir, A Complete History of My Sexual Failures, Chris Waitt’s painfully honest account of his attempts to lift himself out of utter despair.
The World Dramatic audience award went to Captain Abu Raed, another Jordanian film (by Amin Matalqa), about an airport janitor who tells stories to children. The World Dramatic Grand Jury Prize went to King of Ping Pong, a Swedish film about a teenage player, which also won best cinematography. The French comedy I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster won best screenwriting, and the Russian fable Mermaid won best directing. A Special Jury Prize went to the Mexican film Blue Eyelids.
The audience awards are often easy to predict if you’ve been attending public screenings here — the loudest applause, the most cheers, the occasional standing ovation will indicate a likely winner. Not so, this year; the audience picks were relatively unexpected. In the main Dramatic Competition the winner was The Wackness, a coming-of-age story set among hip-hop-loving Manhattan kids (and an aging shrink) in the summer before they ship off to college in 1994. It’s a startlingly accomplished second feature by Jonathan Levine (his first as writer-director), with a star-making performance by much-slimmed-down Josh Peck. In the Documentary Competition, the winner was Fields of Fuel, a film about the history and consequences of gas guzzling, directed by Josh Tickell.
Capping off the night were the Grand Jury awards for Dramatic and Documentary films. The documentary jury consisted of filmmakers Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Heidi Ewing (The Boys of Baraka), Steven Okazaki (White Light /Black Rain), and Annie Sundberg (The Trials of Darryl Hunt), and Independent Feature Project executive director Michelle Byrd. They awarded a Special Jury Prize to The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, and best cinematography to Steven Sebring’s liltingly poetic Patti Smith: Dream of Life, an astute choice. Best editing, which for documentary films is key, was awarded to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the brilliant examination of the great director’s legal struggles by Marina Zenovich. Best directing went to American Teen, Nanette Burstein’s slick but compelling cinéma-vérité-plus look at Ohio high-school seniors; Burstein was joined onstage by “Megan,” the Heather-like blond in the film, who couldn’t help giving a few words of thanks herself, even though the award was specifically for Burstein. The Grand Jury Prize was awarded to Trouble the Water, which follows the experience of a New Orleans couple and their friends during Hurricane Katrina and afterward, as they try to reclaim their decimated neighborhood. (Adding a touch of offscreen drama, Kimberly Rivers Rogers, the wife and wannabe rapper, gave birth while attending the festival in Park City.) The directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, are producers of Michael Moore’s films.
The dramatic-film jury consisted of directors Quentin Tarantino and Mary Harron, and actors Marcia Gay Harden, Diego Luna, and Sandra Oh. They awarded two Special Jury Prizes — one for the “spirit of independent cinema,” to Anywhere, USA, Chusy Haney-Jardine’s homemade Asheville, North Carolina, concoction, and another for “ensemble acting” to Clark Gregg’s kinky comedy Choke, based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel. The latter movie does indeed have a wonderful cast, including Anjelica Huston and Sam Rockwell as a crazy mom and a sex-addicted son, respectively, and Gregg’s father-in-law Joel Grey. The best cinematography and best directing awards both went to Lance Hammer’s extraordinary Ballast, a detached but observant Dogme-style look at what happens to a bunch of interrelated characters in the Mississippi Delta when one of them commits suicide. (Premiere.com interviewed Hammer extensively about the film, to be posted online soon.) The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award went to Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, a politically savvy sci-fi thriller-romance, set in Mexico in the near future. (As previously announced, the movie also won the festival’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize, for $20,000 grant given to science-oriented films.) And finally, the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic film went to Frozen River, a first feature from recent Columbia film school grad Courtney Hunt, about two poor women in upstate New York, one white and one native American, who smuggle immigrants across the Canadian border to earn some extra cash and keep their families together.
Tarantino, who presented the Grand Jury Prize to Hunt, first cautioned the filmmakers in the audience that many worthy candidates would not win any awards, and noted that his film Reservoir Dogs received “fuck-all” at Sundance years ago, as did his fellow juror Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol. And indeed, some of the losers at the awards were highly creditable movies, such as Sunshine Cleaning, The Last Word, and Sugar. But overall, the jury awards this year were quite on target, and the competition films, in years past a festival weak spot, are definitely an impressive group. But then again, that brings us back to the issue of rating the festival on overall quality, which, in the grand scheme of things, is kind of besides the point.
GK: "A detached but observant Dogme-style" film? Like "Turner and Hooch," or more like "Old Yeller"?
Sorry... I do love a good typo.
Posted by: Ray | January 28, 2008 at 05:15 PM
Ah, but it's not a typo, Ray; rather, the original Danish spelling. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 28, 2008 at 05:22 PM
GOD I feel like an idiot... I think I even knew that once.
More precisely, I feel like the PC guy in the Macintosh commercials...
Posted by: Ray | January 28, 2008 at 05:55 PM