The 2007 Sundance Film Festival winners have been announced.
The best U.S. narrative feature was Christopher Zalla's Padre Nuestro / Sangre de Mi Sangre (top photo), about a young Mexican who hops on a truck transporting illegal immigrants from Mexico to New York City, where the young man's father supposedly resides.
The best U.S. documentary, Jason Kohn's Manda Bala / Send a Bullet, also won the best documentary cinematography prize for Heloísa Passos' camera work.
The World Cinema prize for documentaries was given to Eva Mulvad and Anja Al Erhayem's Enemies of Happiness, which revolves around 28-year-old female politician Malalai Joya's parliamentary victory in rabidly patriarchal Afghanistan.
The World Cinema Grand Jury prize for narrative films went to Dror Shaul's Sweet Mud, which is set on a kibbutz in southern Israel in the 1970s. In this coming-of-age drama, a boy must cope with social and cultural hypocrisy as his mother falls prey to mental illness. Sweet Mud was Israel's submission for the 2007 best foreign language film Oscar and it shared the Israeli Academy's Ophir Award for best film.
Irene Taylor Brodsky's Hear and Now, the story of two deaf 65-year-olds who undergo cochlear implant surgery in an attempt to gain the ability to hear, took the audience award for best U.S. documentary.
Two performers received special awards for acting: Jess Weixler for Mitchell Lichtenstein's horror-comedy Teeth, and Tamara Podemski for Sterlin Harjo's Four Sheets to the Wind.
© Jon Farmer / Plum Pictures
James C. Strouse's Grace Is Gone (above), described as a "tearjerker," won the audience award for independent U.S. narrative films. The family drama stars John Cusack as a man who goes on a trip with his daughters while trying to muster enough courage to tell them that their mother has died while serving in Iraq. Strouse also won the Waldo Salt screenwriting award.
John Carney's Irish musical Once was the Sundance audience's choice for best foreign narrative film, while David Sington's British-made In the Shadow of the Moon (above), about NASA's Apollo Space Program, was the best foreign documentary.
CNN's Tom Charity was mostly unimpressed with the downbeat films he saw at this year's Sundance, including the much ballyhooed Dakota Fanning vehicle Hounddog. "What was lacking, almost across the board," Charity writes, "was something to shape and define this vague malaise. Visually nondescript and overwhelmingly conventional in its language and address, American independent cinema has fallen significantly behind series TV for edge and originality."
Kenneth Turan admired the documentaries. "This year proved to be such a strong one for documentaries that several excellent works came away empty-handed," Turan explains in the Los Angeles Times. "One such was Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (right). An engrossing biopic about the self-described 'punk rock warlord' and legendary front man for the Clash, Unwritten reveals Strummer to have been thoughtful, charismatic and something of a visionary."
"Also richly deserving but unrewarded," Turan continues, "was Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain, a dispassionate but emotionally devastating account of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two bombs that ended up eventually killing more than 350,000 people. Alternating grim footage of the human damage and current interviews with those who survived, White Light/Black Rain conveys the horror of those events in unflinching detail. One hopes it is not too late for the world to listen and learn."
I saw a film about a man, his son, and his daughter inheriting an uncle's farm. One night the brother and sister get carried away and are punished by their uncle's spirit.
What was it called? Who was it by?