Another Sundance Film Festival has come and gone, and tonight, January 30th,
2010, the award winners for this year’s fest were announced. Hosted by
David Hyde Pierce, the presenters consisted of this year’s jurors including
Morgan Spurlock, Ondi Timoner, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Parker Posey and more.
Here is the list of winners. Embed links take you to Wamg reviews of that
film:
Grand Jury Prize: Documentary – Restrepo
Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic – Winter’S Bone
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary – The Red Chapel
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic – Animal Kingdom
Audience Award: Documentary – Waiting For Superman
Sundance
Film Festival Awards host David Hyde Pierce with festival director John Cooper.
photo Getty
Writer/director Debra Granik is now two-for-two at the Sundance
Film Festival. “Winter’s Bone,” a quietly powerful suspense tale set in
Missouri’s Ozark woods (read Winter’s
Bone (book review)), won two awards last night at the 2010 festival awards
ceremony: the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic category and the Waldo
Salt screenwriting award (which she shares with co-writer Anne Rosellini).
The
awards come six years after Granik won the director’s award for her feature
film debut, 2004’s Down to the Bone
~ Vera Farmiga
“Winter’s Bone” wasn’t the only film picking up an
award last night to deal with darker subjects. The World Cinema Jury Prize:
Drama went to Australian writer/director David Michôd’s “Animal
Kingdom,” (official site) an intense portrait of an orphaned teen caught
in a showdown between a Melbourne crime family and the police, while the documentary
award was given to “Restrepo,”
(official site - one platoon, one year, one valley) directors Sebastian Junger
and Tim Heatherington’s searing film about their year spent
embedded with the men of Second Platoon in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal
Valley. The documentary winner in the World Cinema category was “The Red
Chapel,” which chronicles the adventures of a journalist, a spastic, and a
straight man as they con their way into the strict regime of North Korea.
Disguised as a theatre troupe, an unscrupulous Danish
journalist and two Korean-Danish comedians gain entry into North Korea and
stage a provocative performance, revealing - in both funny and tragic ways -
the brutal dictatorship's effects on its people.
The Audience Awards for Documentary and Dramatic Film were
respectively presented to “Waiting For Superman,”
Davis Guggenheim’s (”An Inconvenient Truth”) look at the
crisis currently unfolding in America’s public schools, and “happythankyoumoreplease,”
the cheery debut of “How
I Met Your Mother” star Josh Radnor, which received a standing ovation at
its premiere screening. The World Cinema awards went to Lucy Walker’s eco-art
documentary “Wasteland” and Javier Fuentes-Leõn’s dramatic ghost story
“Contracorriente (Undertow).”
Meanwhile, Directing Awards went to, respectively, “Smash His
Camera,”
Leon Gast’s profile of paparazzo Ron Galella (U.S.
documentary); “3 Backyards,”
Eric Mendelsohn’s triptych of a suburban day (U.S.
dramatic); Christian Frei’s “Space Tourists,” about Russia’s first
interspace visitors (World Cinema documentary); and Juan Carlos Valdivia’s
“Southern District,” which chronicles a bourgeois Bolivian family
(World Cinema dramatic).
Special Jury Prizes were also awards to the documentaries “Enemies
of the People” and “Gasland,” and the narrative film “Sympathy for
Delicious,” the feature-directing debut of Mark Ruffalo.
17 year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track
down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared.
If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods.
Challenging her outlaw kins code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks
through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins
to piece together the truth.
Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, WINTERS BONE is directed by Debra Granik
(DOWN TO THE BONE) and adapted for the screen by Granik and Anne Rosellini. The
film stars Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Garret
Dillahunt, Sheryl Lee and Tate Taylor.
WINTER'S BONE is an official selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festivals
Dramatic Competition
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Sundance
Film Festival Awards host David Hyde Pierce with festival director John Cooper.
photo Getty
