Alternative Film Guide

Finally, a little something on the 2007 Sundance Film Festival winners.

Earlier today, I posted an article on Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala / Send a Bullet, which was chosen best U.S. documentary. Manda Bala also won the best documentary cinematography prize for Heloísa Passos’s camera work.

Among the other top winners were best U.S. narrative feature Padre Nuestro (top), about a young Mexican who hops on a truck transporting illegal immigrants from Mexico to New York City, where the man’s father supposedy resides. Padre Nuestro was directed by Christopher Zalla.

The World Cinema Grand Jury prize for narrative films went to Dror Shaul’s Adama meshugaat / 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 Oscars, and it shared the Israeli Academy’s Ophir Award for best film last year.

The World Cinema prize for documentaries was given to Eva Mulvad and Anja Al Erhayem’s Vores lykkes fjender / Enemies of Happiness, which revolves around 28-year-old female politician Malalai Joya’s parliamentary victory in rabidly patriarchal Afghanistan.

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, 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. (More on the Dakota Fanning rape controversy). "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 says in the Los Angeles Times. "One such was Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (above). 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."

Full list of 2007 Sundance Film Festival winners

 

Jessica Lange Speaks Out in the BELFAST TELEGRAPH

Final Oscar Ballots Mailed Today

MANDA BALA: Brazil’s Corruption, Kidnappings, and Frogs

Sharon Stone, Isaiah Washington, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, and Gay Slurs

Oscar-Nominated Shorts to Screen at AMPAS

 

Add Alternative Film Guide to:        blinkbits BlinkList Bloglines blogmarks co.mments connotea del.icio.us De.lirio.us digg Fark FeedLounge feedmelinks Furl GoogleReader Kinja LinkaGoGo Ma.gnolia MyAOL MyMSN MyYahoo NetVibes NewsAlloy NewsBurst NewsGator NewsVine Netvouz Pluck RawSugar Reddit Rojo scuttle Shadows SimplyHeadlines Simpy Smarking Spurl TailRank Technorati Wists YahooMyWeb

 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS