2008 Sundance Film Festival
 The films director Courtney Hunt accepts the Grand Jury Prize for her film "Frozen River" as filmmaker Quentin Tarantino looks on. |
Last night, filmmakers and Festivalgoers celebrated the films 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 films award, he recalled the 1992 Awards Ceremony during which he did not win a prize for his film 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 films.
Awarded to one of the 16 U.S. films in the Dramatic Competition, the 2008 Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Courtney Hunt's film Frozen River. The films story is that 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 film 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 film 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 films evolving before my very eyes," he said. "This year, we're witnessing the emergence of filmmakers we’ll hear from for a long time."
The Audience Award: Documentary was presented to Josh Tickell's film 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 film The Wackness, directed by Jonathan Levine. The films set 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."