Sharing Top Prize a Popular Move

It was a decision that was both sensible and Solomonic. The Sundance Film Festival split its grand jury prize for best dramatic film between the competition’s two consensus favorites and added emphasis to its Saturday night decision by giving each co-winner a second major award. It provided a satisfying ending to what, in terms of overall quality and lack of hair-pulling fiascoes, was the most successful festival in years.

The dramatic jury divided its top prize between a pair of writer-directors. Karyn Kusama’s “Girlfight” and Kenneth Lonergan’s “You Can Count on Me” were the popular co-winners, with Kusama also claiming the directing award and Lonergan taking home the Waldo Salt screenwriting award.

Kusama’s film, a potent feminist melodrama about the struggles of an aspiring teenage boxer that’s been acquired for distribution by Screen Gems, was touted as a possible winner from its first tumultuous screening. Kusama seemed overwhelmed by the awards (“My heart is beating so fast, I’m so nervous all of a sudden”) but retained the presence of mind to thank executive producer John Sayles (“my mentor, a great teacher and a great friend”) and to give a message to her fellow directors.

“To all those filmmakers whose films aren’t here, keep on rockin’,” Kusama said with passion. “Your films will live on beyond all of us, and that’s all that matters.”

Lonergan’s very different but equally accomplished film had just as many partisans. A successful New York-based playwright (“This Is Our Youth”), Lonergan constructed an artful tale about the conflicting lifestyles of a devoted sister and brother, deftly played by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. Made with delicacy and tact, this beautifully textured film has an unmatched gift for character, allowing its funny and moving people to be exactly who they are.

Wearing an orange sweater that color-coordinated perfectly with the Sundance signage, Lonergan, whose original script became “Analyze This” nine years and 14 writers after he wrote the first draft, noted that “You Can Count On Me” was the first screenplay he’d ever written “that came out exactly as I wanted it.”

‘Long Night’s Journey Into Day’ Is Top Doc

On the documentary side, the grand jury prize winner was Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann’s revealing look at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Long Night’s Journey Into Day.” Featuring intensely emotional confrontations between perpetrators of apartheid-related violence and the relatives of their victims, “Journey” exposes the dehumanization the country’s racial policies caused and illustrates the human need for forgiveness and how painfully difficult that can be to achieve. The co-directors praised each other, with Hoffmann thanking Reid for, “when I said someone should make a documentary on this subject, having the audacity to say that someone should be us.”

Though it didn’t take the top doc prize, the evening’s biggest nonfiction winner was Marc Singer’s “Dark Days,” which earned the audience award for documentary, the freedom of expression award and half of the cinematography award. More than five years in the making, “Dark Days” is the story of the people who live in Manhattan’s underground train tunnels, and it has a back story as strong and compelling as its on-screen material.

A former model, the British-born Singer not only lived underground with his subjects for two years, he used them as his entire crew. More a homeless advocate than a filmmaker, he thought of making “Dark Days” only as a way to earn money to get these people above ground and rented his first camera without even knowing how to load it.

“I just wanted to get them out,” he said simply earlier in the week. “They deserve better than that.”

Looking a bit like a medieval monk with his close-cropped hair and hooded sweatshirt, Singer didn’t forget to thank the people who did teach him how to load that camera.

The other half of the documentary cinematography award went to Andrew Young for his and Susan Todd’s lively survey, “Americanos: Latino Life in the United States.” Young added an unexpected note to the night when he thanked Todd for being “my friend, my wife, my lover and, as of 6:30 last night, the mother of my son.”

On the dramatic side, the cinematography award went to Tom Krueger for “Committed,” Lisa Krueger’s wry fable about love and, yes, commitment, that features the unmistakable and irresistible sense of humor that marked Krueger’s debut, “Manny and Lo.”

Starring Heather Graham as a young woman with a knack for faith married to a man who doesn’t seem to deserve it, “Committed” illustrates Krueger’s fascination with what she calls “different forms of denial, with people’s ability to create visions of the world apart from reality. The way people fool themselves, and how their choice of words reveal that, that’s inherently funny to me.”

Special Awards Honor Outstanding Acting

The dramatic jury also handed out a pair of special awards for acting. Donal Logue got one for outstanding performance playing an overweight Lothario whose gift for seducing women wilts in the face of love in Jenniphr Goodman’s “The Tao of Steve,” while a special jury prize for outstanding ensemble performance went to the cast of “Songcatcher.”

Set in the hollows of Appalachia circa 1907 and written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, “Songcatcher” features the protean Janet McTeer (“the goddess” according to the director) as a no-nonsense musicologist visiting her schoolteacher sister (Jane Adams) who discovers that the purest versions of old-English ballads--not to mention the cutest guys (especially Aidan Quinn)--exist in these hidden hills. Though a bit on the nose in its “stop and smell the mountain lilac” scenario, “Song catcher” is balanced by its strong sense of place, by its wonderful music (singer Iris Dement has a memorable cameo, as does the veteran Pat Carroll), and, not surprisingly, by its string of excellent performances.

On the documentary side, the best directing award went to veterans Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,” “The Celluloid Closet”) for their haunting and sobering “Paragraph 175.” Named for the section of the German penal code forbidding sodomy and using gripping testimony from the few remaining gay concentration camp survivors, “Paragraph 175” tells the familiar story of the Holocaust’s horrors from a shattering new perspective, that of the persecuted homosexual community.

Not to be outdone by the dramatic side, the documentary jury gave out two special jury prizes of its own. One, for documentary writing, went to Daniel McCabe, Paul Stekler and Steve Fayer for “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” a measured, thoughtful two-hour, 40-minute look at the former governor of Alabama that views his career as an almost Shakespearean tragedy of a potentially great man focused in the wrong direction.

Getting the special jury prize for artistic achievement was the very personal “The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack,” an attempt by Aiyana Elliott to understand and come to terms with her feckless father, folk music legend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, generally considered the indispensable link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. A lovable character but a close-to-impossible father, this self-created man was so rarely at home, and so rarely available when he was, that the director calls the film the result of “a lifelong struggle to get time with my dad.”

Even with all these awards, it wouldn’t be possible to do justice to a collection of docs so remarkable that Jon Else said he and his fellow jurors were “bowled over by the richness.” These include “Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians,” Anne Makepeace’s fascinating and thorough look at the photographer whose 40,000 images recorded Native American life.

Two separate docs used widely different subjects to explore how Northern ignorance about the cultural folkways of the South led to violence and miscarriages of justice. Elizabeth Barret’s “Stranger With a Camera” dealt with the shooting death of a Canadian documentarian by an Eastern Kentucky landowner in 1967, while Barak Goodman’s gripping “Scottsboro: An American Tragedy” provides a new point of view about one of the classic pre-Civil Rights-era miscarriages of justice.

Aside from the documentary one, Sundance gives two other audience awards. The dramatic award went to the American Spectrum’s “Two Family House,” a family drama written and directed by Raymond DeFelitta. The world cinema audience award went to “Saving Grace,” starring Brenda Blethyn and Craig Ferguson in a British comedy about some unlikely marijuana growers.

Among the other awards, the jury prize in short filmmaking went to “Five Feet High and Rising” by Peter Sollett, and the jury prize in Latin American cinema was shared by a pair of Mexican films, Luis Estrada’s “Herod’s Law” and Arturo Ripstein’s “No One Writes to the Colonel,” based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez work.

Meanwhile, over at rival festival Slamdance, the grand jury feature award was won by Frank Novak’s “Good Housekeeping” and the audience feature award went to Farhad Yawari’s “Dolphins,” about, the catalog notes, someone eager to “escape from the harshness of the mental hospital by submerging herself in a dream world inspired by her goldfish bowl.” Anyone who survived 10 days at this festival will understand exactly how that poor person feels.