‘Three Seasons’ Shines Brightest : Modern-day Vietnam tale wins three awards, including top drama.

Charity began at home for the Sundance Film Festival, as Tony Bui’s “Three Seasons,” which was developed at a Sundance Institute Feature Film Lab, won three awards Saturday night, including the Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition.

Beautifully shot (by Lisa Rinzler, who won the Cinematography Award) and delicately paced, “Three Seasons” intertwines a trio of stories set in today’s Vietnam. To be released by October Films, “Three Seasons” became the first dramatic film in Sundance history to take home the Audience Award as well as the Grand Jury Prize.

“It’s a good thing I’m under a lot of medication,” said Bui, fighting the flu and genuinely shocked after his film won its third award. He quoted as inspiration a film school teacher who told him, “No matter what happens, try and make films that are personal. Try to have a voice that will flow from within, to speak in a way no one else is speaking.”

On the documentary side, the top prize went to Chris Smith’s “American Movie,” acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. It details the nominally comic tribulations of Mark Borchardt, a manic, obsessive, would-be director from Menominee Falls, Wis., determined to hit the cinematic big time via a 35-minute horror short called “Coven.”

This year, for the first time, Sundance opted to make films from American Spectrum as well as the official competition eligible for both Audience Awards. Spectrum is the section for films that don’t make the cut for the competition. The surprise winner in the documentary section was “Genghis Blues,” a Spectrum selection.

Made by brothers Roko and Adrian Belic, “Genghis” accompanies an American blues singer who travels to the Central Asian republic of Tuva to participate in a nationwide throat singing competition. Kongar-ol Ondar, a legendary Tuvan singer, accompanied the film to Park City, and astonished audiences at impromptu concerts around town with his mind-altering vocal abilities.

Dazzled by their victory, the Belics appeared on stage with their mother, Denisa (“She forced us to watch documentaries since our childhood,” said one of the brothers), and thanked physicist Richard Feynmann for piquing their interest in Tuva and the late world music guru and KPFK-FM disc jockey Mario Cassetta for accompanying them to that far-off land.

Also doing well on the doc side was another Vietnam film, “Regret to Inform,” Barbara Sonneborn’s 10-years-in-the-making examination of the experiences of widows on both sides of the war. “Regret” won the Directing Award and shared the Cinematography Award with Emiko Omori’s “Rabbit in the Moon.” Omori’s film (which she also shot) explores, with anger and artfulness, the situation of Japanese Americans interned in government camps during World War II.

Herself a Vietnam War widow, director Sonneborn movingly commented that she “never would have thought when my husband died 31 years ago that his death would have led me on this journey, a transformation of his death to a statement on war and its lessons.”

Taking the Directing Award for drama was Eric Mendelsohn, whose well-received “Judy Berlin” featured an ironic look at relationships deteriorating and re-forming during a solar eclipse in the Long Island town of Babylon.

Sharing the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award were a pair of writer-directors. Frank Whalley won for “Joe the King,” about a boy’s miserable life in yet another dysfunctional family, and Audrey Wells triumphed for “Guinevere,” a wry, engaging look at a May-December romance that featured Sarah Polley in what might be the festival’s best performance.

Wells, best known for writing “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” said “the greatest challenge of going from writing to directing was having to get dressed by 5 a.m. each day. Now that I’ve won this, I can go back to working in my pajamas.”

‘Happy, Texas’ Actor Wins Special Jury Award

While “Happy, Texas” did not capture the Audience Award--despite the bidding war it caused among avid distributors--it did earn Steve Zahn, its most entertaining component, a Special Jury Award for Comedic Performance for his role as an escaped convict masquerading as a gay choreographer. Director Mark Illsley accepted the award and elicited the evening’s only sustained hissing when he announced, “Damn, I wish Steve was here. He’s sitting in a condo somewhere--I didn’t have enough tickets.”

A pair of films in American Spectrum also featured memorable acting. Brothers Mark and Michael Polish were eerily moving and believable as Siamese twins in “Twin Falls Idaho,” which they co-wrote and Michael directed. And Susan Traylor was indelible in “Valerie Flake” with her poignant, painful work as a woman turned by tragedy into someone bitter and scaldingly sarcastic.

Gavin O’Connor, whose “Tumbleweeds” featured a fine performance by Janet McTeer, won the dramatic side’s Filmmakers Trophy, voted on by all the competition directors. Taking the same award for documentary was master director Jon Else for his amusing and entertaining “Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle.”

The second Special Jury Award in drama, for distinctive vision in filmmaking, went to Scott King’s “Treasure Island,” an idiosyncratic, quasi-experimental drama about World War II intelligence officers plotting to fool the Japanese.

The documentary jury gave but one Special Jury Award, to Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgan’s “On the Ropes,” a “Hoop Dreams”-type boxing saga set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The tale of three amateur fighters and their trainer, all desperate to make something of their lives, “On the Ropes” takes full advantage of a story that emphasizes the sad and irresistible complexities of reality.

Some of the Deserving Leave Empty-Handed

This year, for the first time, Sundance began an Audience Award in its world cinema section. It was shared by two films, Tom Twyker’s hyperkinetic “Run Lola Run” from Germany and, from France, Radu Mihaileanu’s “Train of Life,” a comic drama about the Holocaust that won the Critics’ Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Among the awards that were not new this year, Stanley Nelson’s excellent, informative “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords” won the Freedom of Expression nod; CalArts instructor Mark Osborne’s stop-motion IMAX project “More” took the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking (the first time it’s been won by an animated work); Mexican director Alejandro Springall’s amusing and surreal “Santitos” won the Jury Prize in Latin American Cinema; and “Life Is to Whistle,” the new film from Cuban director Fernando Perez, went home with the Special Jury Award in the same area. And across town at Slamdance, Heidi Van Lier’s “Chi Girl” won the Grand Jury Prize for best feature.

As always with Sundance (and with other festivals, for that matter), deserving films came away with nothing. In the dramatic competition, one of the neglected works (though it did pick up a distribution deal from Fine Line) was Jim Fall’s “Trick,” a good-natured and likable “boy meets boy” romantic comedy written by Jason Schafer that has a substantial chance of crossing over to mainstream audiences.

And on the documentary side, it’s a shame that the jury couldn’t find anything for Paola di Florio’s deeply affecting look at the life and career of virtuoso violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, “Speaking in Strings.” Di Florio, a childhood friend of the artist, has constructed an intimate portrait of the iconoclastic Salerno-Sonnenberg, strong-willed, vulnerable but able to make powerful connections through her music even during moments of terrible personal crisis. Your heart can’t help but go out to her because, in this exceptional film, hers goes out to you.