Sundance, Day 6

This article was originally part of the Insider Cinema guide to Hollywood, a website from the mid-2000s. We are reposting it here as both a writing sample and a guide for those seeking to get their foot in the door in Hollywood.

It is Saturday night, and as the festival winds down, awards are presented, backs are patted, and some heads are even hung in shame.

This year marked an interesting twist on the Hollywood mentality that stars bring in audiences when star-driven vehicles like What Just Happened? (Robert DeNiro), The Great Buck Howard (Collin Farrell), and Blind Date (Stanley Tucci) were met with lukewarm responses.

At the awards dinner, the winners were announced:

Frozen River won the grand jury prize for dramatic features.  Courtney Hunt’s remarkable and deeply emotional first feature is a realistic look at the world of human smuggling and the difficult choices facing poor, single mothers, and as Mark Boone Junior, one of the stars of the film said earlier in the week, “Because it was a fucking good script.” 

The Wackness won the audience award for dramatic features.  Starring Mary Kate Olsen and Ben Kingsley, it takes place during the sweltering summer of 1994, as Rudy Giuliani is scouring New York City within an inch of its life.  Hip-hop is permeating white youth culture, and a pot-dealing loser kid, Luke Shapiro, is trying to figure out how to solve his parents’ insolvency, beat depression, and get laid before pushing off to college.  He resolves his problems by trading weed with his therapist (Kingsley).

Trouble the Water won the grand jury prize for documentaries by asking the question, “How is it that Hurricane Katrina managed to revolutionize American attitudes about the environment, but somehow the very people most devastated by the storm have become refugees in their own country, and their experiences have been all but forgotten?”  

Fields of Fuel won the audience award for documentaries, which follows an expert young activist who, driven by his own emotionally charged motives, shuttles us on a revelatory, whirlwind journey to unravel the nation’s addiction to oil—from its historical origins to political constructs that support it, to alternatives available now and the steps we can take to change things.

King of Ping Pong won the grand jury prize for a dramatic feature in the World Cinema Competition and won the Sundance award for excellence in cinematography for an international dramatic feature for Askild Vik Edvardsen’s work.  Director, Jens Jonsson, renders this delicate story about a 16-year-old outcast who finds refuge in his ping pong expertise, and directs with finesse and quiet humor that infuses everyday drama, and even a few shocking moments of near calamity, with lightness and warmth.

Captain Abu Raed won the audience award for an international dramatic film.  The first independent film to come out of Jordan, Captain Abu Raed will be remembered for more than its historical significance. It is also a beautiful, life-affirming account of the power of storytelling and an ode to the ordinary people we meet along life’s path who change our destiny. 

Man on Wire won both the jury and the audience in the international documentary competition and follows a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit steps out on a wire suspended 1,350 feet above ground between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He dances on the wire with no safety net for almost an hour, crossing it eight times before he is arrested for what becomes known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Lance Hammer’s Ballast won the directing prize for American films, and also won the Sundance award for excellence in cinematography for a U.S. dramatic feature, which went to Lol Crawley.  Ballast is one of those rare films that maximize the medium through an aesthetic of understatement.  In the cold, winter light of a rural Mississippi Delta township, a man’s suicide radically transforms three characters’ lives and throws off-balance what has long been a static arrangement among them.

Anna Melikyan’s Mermaid won the directing prize in world cinema.  Fusing myth, dream, and warped reality with the abundant invention, the film is an ingenious vision of dark enchantment. Mermaid marks the emergence of a marvelously gifted filmmaker and represents commercial art-house cinema at its very best. 

Nino Kirtadze’s Durakovo: Village of Fools won the documentary directing prize, which takes a sobering look at a xenophobic teacher who recruits young people under the guise of right-wing nationalism. 

Alex Rivera and David Riker’s Sleep Dealer won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for American films.  Memo Cruz is a young campesino who lives with his family in a town fighting for its life, the small, dusty farm village of Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca. A private company has hijacked control of the area’s water supply and is selling it back to the village at outrageous prices, provoking the mobilization of aqua-terrorist cells.

Samuel Benchetrit’s I Always Wanted to be a Gangster won for the best international screenplay, and at the center of Benchetrit’s charming existential comedy about wishful criminality are four stories and an unadorned roadside cafeteria, revitalizing the Stagecoach archetype for the 21st century.

Joe Bini’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired won for best documentary editing on the American.  It obviously paid off since the Weinstein Company and HBO Documentary purchased the distribution rights at the onset of the festival.   

Irena Dol’s The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins won for best international documentary editing; when Vanessa Beecroft, a modern art provocateur, decides to adopt orphaned Sudanese twins while incorporating them into her artwork, she sparks ethical and emotional fires from Sudan to New York.

Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring won the Sundance award for excellence in cinematography for a U.S. documentary, for Patti Smith: Dream of Life.  It is a hypnotic plunge, a breathing collage of this legendary musician/poet/painter/activist’s philosophy and artistry that feels as if it sprang directly from her soul. A punk pioneer and spiritual child of Rimbaud, Blake, and Burroughs, Patti Smith’s fierce poetry and rock music shook up New York’s 1970s underground scene, and her work continues to be stirred organically by her rigorous mind, beloved artistic touchstones, and world events.

Al Massad won the Sundance award for excellence in cinematography in the world documentary category, for Recycle.  Taking place in Zarqa, Jordan’s second-largest city, with close to one million people, the city’s political Islamists are a powerful force, and it is the birthplace of Abu Musa al Zarqawi, the brutal leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was killed by American forces in 2005. Many in town knew al Zarqawi, many in his family remain, and Zarqa continues to be a source of new recruits to the jihadist cause.

A Spirit of Independence Award (which is a special jury prize) was voted to director Chusy Haney-Jardine for Anywhere, USA.   Told in three parts (“Penance,” “Loss,” and “Ignorance”), Chusy Haney-Jardine’s wildly original snapshot of du jour America is such an audacious, personal expression of vision that you occasionally feel as if it’s being projected directly from his brain.

Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, and Brad Henke won a prize for work by an ensemble cast for Choke, which is based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, and was acquired by Fox Searchlight earlier in the week.   

Lisa F. Jackson was given a special jury prize for directing the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.  Jackson’s frank conversations with activists, doctors, peacekeepers, and the rapists themselves paint a sordid picture where rape is a key destabilizing method in a corrupt cycle involving illegal profiteering from coltan (the ore used in cell phones and laptops), which in turn funds militia groups. Compound this with ingrained beliefs in male superiority, and the fact that the sex-crimes police force is literally one woman, and you have the makings of a catastrophe.

Ernesto Contreras was also given a special jury prize for directing the international drama Blue Eyelids, which is set in a modern Mexican megalopolis, a world filled with pale shades of blue, the film showcases Contreras’s steady direction and Cecilia Suárez and Enrique Arreola’s wonderful performances, which lend quiet inertia to the film as they seek love and connectedness.

THE TALLY:   

Baghead

Sony Pictures Classics acquires North American rights for high six figures.

International rights are still available.

Ballast

Celluloid Dreams acquires international rights 

Domestic rights are still available, and pic is being repped by William Morris Independent

The Black List: Volume One

HBO acquires all rights 

Choke

Fox Searchlight acquires world rights, with exceptions to some national territories, for five million dollars

The Deal

Worldwide distribution rights controlled by Peace Arch Entertainment

Frozen River

Sony Pictures Classics acquired U.S. rights for mid-six figures

Foreign rights are still up for grabs

Hamlet 2

Focus Features acquires all rights for ten million dollars

Henry Poole Is Here

Overture Films has acquired all U.S. rights for three and a half million dollars

Kicking It

Acquired by ESPN

Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Weinstein Company acquires all foreign rights for mid-six figures

HBO Documentary acquires all domestic U.S. rights

Up the Yangtze

Zeitgeist Films acquires all rights

ACCORDING TO RUMOR:

Phoebe in Wonderland 

Multiple buyers are interested and could develop into a bidding war.

Sleep Dealer

Multiple buyers courting the film, with IFC in the lead.

Sugar

From the directors of Half Nelson, it has several interested parties and may have a deal sewn up before the end of the weekend.  

Trailer Park of Terror

Multiple buyers interested.  

Stay up to date with InsiderCinema.com for all your Sundance info, and all your insights into the entertainment industry. 


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