An anti-Semitic Jew, men who have become women, women who have become men, and banned gay Boy Scouts shared the spotlight at Saturday night’s Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony.
In a year of no consensus favorites, Henry Bean’s “The Believer” took the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s top award as chosen by a jury of five film professionals, including directors Darren Aronofsky (an award winner for 1998’s “Pi”) and Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”). This provocative portrait of a New York Jewish Nazi sympathizer, played with much charisma and smarts by newcomer Ryan Gosling, was the most controversial of the festival’s 16 dramatic competition entries.
Its champions applauded the portrayal of the ultimate self-hating Jew while others noted similarities to “American History X” and complained that the lead character’s attitude shifts eventually become incomprehensible. As of awards night, no distributor had bought the film.
The Documentary Grand Jury Prize went to “Southern Comfort,” Kate Davis’ open-hearted tale of transgender couples living in a trailer park in the “Bubba-land” of rural Georgia. The focus is a female-to-male transsexual named Robert Eads, whose whiskers and wiry build give him the authentic look of a cowboy yet who, in one of nature’s cruel ironies, is dying of ovarian cancer.
Although the movie addresses the discrimination of two dozen doctors who refuse to treat Robert, its primary purpose is to humanize a group of people most commonly portrayed as freaks on trash TV talk shows. The result is one of the most emotionally engaging of a particularly strong group of documentaries, if not necessarily the most deep-digging narrative. “Southern Comfort” is seeking a limited theatrical release before it debuts on HBO in November.
A sex-change operation also is at the center of the campy musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which won the Dramatic Audience Award (voted on by festivalgoers) plus the Dramatic Directing Award for writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell. Amid the mostly somber competition films, “Hedwig,” an adaptation of Mitchell’s off-Broadway hit, provided a welcome blast of energy to festival audiences, with Mitchell donning a big blond wig and belting out ’70s-style rock tunes with a voice that crosses Julian Lennon and Meat Loaf.
Tolerance and love are the themes here as well, with Mitchell’s title character an immigrant from East Berlin who survives a botched male-to-female operation (the “angry inch” refers to what’s left) and comes to terms with her sexual identity while touring the U.S. with her band. New Line Cinema, which financed “Hedwig,” will release the movie later this year.
Back on the intolerance side of the scale, Tom Shepard’s “Scout’s Honor” shared the Documentary Audience Award for its account of the clash between the Boy Scouts of America and those who sought to overturn the ban on gay scouts and leaders. The film also won the Freedom of Expression Award, which goes to the documentary that best illuminates an issue of social or political concern.
The other co-winner of the Documentary Audience Award was “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” a skateboarding history lesson as told by director Stacy Peralta, one of the original “Z-Boys” who helped pioneer what came to be known as X-treme sports. He also won the Documentary Directing Award.
The World Cinema Audience Award, recognizing the most popular of the 27 films in the festival’s international section, went to Zhang Yimou’s “The Road Home,” which stars Zhang Ziyi (of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) in a family memory tale that views rural Chinese life from a modern perspective. Sony Pictures Classics is to release the film this spring.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan collected the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his clever thriller “Memento,” which uses a backward chronology to unravel the story of a man with no short-term memory (Guy Pearce) trying to solve his wife’s murder without forgetting key bits of evidence. “Memento” previously was a favorite at last September’s Toronto Film Festival and will be released this spring by IFC Films.
The dramatic jury recognized Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “The Deep End,” a finely crafted suspense drama starring Tilda Swinton as a mother taking extreme steps to protect her gay son, by presenting its Cinematography Award to Giles Nuttgens, who provided the movie’s striking seaside images. Fox Searchlight bought the film over the weekend.
The documentary Cinematography Award went to veteran documentarian Albert Maysles (“Gimme Shelter”), who photographed Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson’s “Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton,” an examination of poverty’s brutal impact on a Mississippi Delta school and family.
The dramatic jury awarded a Special Jury Prize to Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek for their portrayals of a couple racked by grief and the desire for vengeance in Todd Field’s “In the Bedroom.” Miramax bought this carefully wrought, deliberately paced drama during the festival and likely will release it late in the year.
The documentary jury bestowed a Special Jury Prize on Edet Belzberg’s “Children Underground,” a portrait of abandoned children living in a subway station in Bucharest, Romania.
The Jury Prize in Latin American Cinema was shared by Sandra Werneck’s “Possible Loves,” a Brazilian romance, and Maria Novarro’s “Without a Trace,” a Mexican road movie about an art smuggler and a single mother on the run.
