Popular Films Take Top Prizes at Sundance Fest : Movies: Festival juries break with tradition to award Grand Jury Prize, acting award to crowd-pleasing ‘In the Soup.’

The Sundance Film Festival broke with tradition and pleasantly surprised its ever-increasing audience by awarding the Grand Jury Prize to “In the Soup,” one of the most popular films of the 10-day event. An equally crowd-pleasing jury prize for artistic excellence also went to “Soup” co-star Seymour Cassell, a veteran of several John Cassavetes films, who roared through his performance as a life-affirming hoodlum who befriends a timid film director.

“You guys can eat at my house anytime, anywhere, don’t worry about it,” Alexandre Rockwell, “Soup’s” clearly flabbergasted director, told the jury as a standing-room-only crowd cheered at Saturday night’s raucous award ceremony. Cassell, who had been neglected by Hollywood in recent years, was equally moved, saying: “This film, this audience, this festival told me how wonderful it was to do something for nothing, for your heart.”

Also winning two awards was “The Waterdance.” Screenwriter and co-director Neal Jimenez, who based this story of a writer’s time in a rehabilitation ward after a catastrophic accident of his own experience, won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and the film itself took the dramatic half of the Audience Award as the picture most popular with the festival’s paying customers.

On the documentary side, the grand prize was divided between two very different films, “A Brief History of Time,” Errol Morris’ clever and quirky look at physicist Stephen Hawking and his theories about the beginnings of the universe, and “Finding Christa,” by Camille Billops and James Hatch, the story of how Billops’ natural daughter, whom she had given up for adoption in 1962, came to find her mother.

Morris’ film also won the documentary half of the Filmmakers’ Trophy, voted on by the competition filmmakers themselves. The dramatic trophy went to “Zebrahead,” again one of the festival’s more popular films. A “Jungle Fever” set among Detroit high school students, “Zebrahead” deals with the chaos caused by an interracial romance. “A year ago I was sitting here in the 12th row with a script in hand and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it,” screenwriter-director Anthony Drazan said in accepting. “To my fellow filmmakers: It can be done.”

“In the Soup’s” director Rockwell, who won a special jury prize here in 1984 for his earlier film “Hero,” admitted to basing this quacky, stylish and innocuously comic film and its directing protagonist Adolpho Rollo (deftly played by Steve Buscemi) on his own scuffling days. And Rockwell’s wife, Jennifer Beals, has a nice cameo as Rollo’s next-door neighbor and potential dream date.

Winner of the Audience Award for best documentary was “Brothers Keeper,” a poignant, riveting piece of Americana that shows what transpired when one of four mentally feeble farmer brothers in Upstate New York dies in the night and another brother is accused of his murder. The cinematography award in a documentary category went to Trinh T. Minh-ha and Kathleen Beeler for “Shoot for the Contents,” a non-linear look at China before Tian An Men Square, while former Jean-Luc Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin won special mention for “My Crasy Life,” his look at Los Angeles’ Samoan street gangs.

The festival juries, which in the past have been accused of selecting obscure films to make political or aesthetic points, this year skipped only one of the festival’s most talked about films, writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”

Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing,” “Dogs” is a tale of a heist gone wrong that features more blood and violence than all the other Sundance films combined. Yet the mayhem proved to be overblown enough to take on Grand Guignol qualities, and the brash and energetic 28-year-old Tarantino, who was unapologetic at loving violence to death, clearly is a stylist to look for.

Several of this year’s films in the dramatic competition touched on gay themes or situations, and two of them were given prizes. Ellen Kuras’ adventurous camera work for “Swoon,” writer-director Tom Kalin’s take on the 1924 Leopold-Loeb thrill killing, earned the cinematography award, and Christopher Munch’s “The Hours and Times,” an elegant meditation on the relationship between John Lennon and Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, was given a special jury prize for artistic excellence.

Despite the ever-increasing crowds, which led to closed waiting lists and signs at theaters reading “Way Sold Out,” the positive spirit that characterizes Sundance remains intact. For this is not only a festival that exists primarily for the filmmakers themselves, it is one that reminds everyone, even the visiting Hollywood types, that there are people out there who still make films because they believe passionately in the emotional and political power of the medium, not just its ability to provide entertainment and mint money.

As “Soup’s” director Rockwell said in introducing his film on Saturday afternoon: “It’s great to meet filmmakers who are as crazy as I am and as desperate to make their films.” It is indeed.