Women and Their Stories Merit Prizes

Women, as subjects and behind the camera in documentaries and dramatic features, were very much in the majority when the Sundance Film Festival announced its prizes at a Saturday night event that, apparently for economic reasons, did without a closing party for the first time in memory.

“Personal Velocity,” the stories of three women (Parker Posey, Kyra Sedgwick and Fairuza Balk) leaving troublesome relationships with deeply clueless men, won the dramatic grand jury prize. Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, who wrote the short stories the film is based on, “Velocity” also took the cinematography award for Ellen Kuras, who has now won the prize an unprecedented three times, including once for Miller’s previous Sundance feature, “Angela.” The film will be released by United Artists.

“I can’t believe this, I just can’t believe this is happening,” said an ecstatic Miller, who thanked her husband, actor Daniel Day Lewis, for his help in the editing room and in watching their child, as well as her parents (playwright Arthur Miller is her father) “for letting me move into their house and cut the film in their barn.”

Also winning two prizes, including the coveted dramatic audience award, was HBO’s “Real Women Have Curves,” set in the Latino community of East L.A. and directed by Patricia Cardoso. This warm, affirmative effort, a pleasant surprise among the usual Sundance detritus of films about addled slackers and women who bark like dogs, explores the conflicts between a bright, ambitious high school graduate and her caustic, difficult mother. Co-stars America Ferrera, a 17-year-old L.A. resident, and the veteran Lupe Ontiveros shared a special jury prize for acting and wept in each other’s arms when accepting the award.

“I’ve been trying to get my first feature made for 10 years; there were many times when I was ready to give up and be a farmer or something,” said director Cardoso. Co-screenwriter (with George LaVoo) Josefina Lopez, whose play was the basis for the script, thanked HBO: “I wrote this when I was 19 but it took 11 years to get made because no one had the courage to show real women on the screen.”

On the documentary side, the grand jury prize went to “Daughter From Danang,” directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, which explores how unexpectedly wide was the cultural gap between a Vietnamese American woman who was adopted by a U.S. family when she was 7 and the Vietnamese family she reunites with 22 years later. Franco thanked “our protagonists: They opened their lives to our cameras at moments so intimate we didn’t know what to do.”

The only documentary to take two prizes was Lee Hirsch’s “Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony,” a stirring examination of the role music played in South Africa’s battle against apartheid, which earned the documentary audience award and the Freedom of Expression award.

Perhaps as frustrated as observers were by the dramatic competition’s absence of completely realized films on the order of last year’s “Deep End,” “In the Bedroom” and “Memento,” the jury overcompensated by handing out awards to numerous films. The dramatic directing award went to Gary Winick (one of the producers of “Personal Velocity”) for “Tadpole,” to be distributed by Miramax, a lightweight sex farce about a sophisticated 15-year-old boy who has a wicked crush on stepmother Sigourney Weaver.

Taking the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award was Gordy Hoffman for “Love Liza,” acquired by Sony Pictures Classics, which stars his brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a bravura performance as a husband who takes refuge in sniffing gasoline fumes when his wife commits suicide.

Aside from its award to “Real Women,” the dramatic jury gave out two more special jury prizes. One, for ensemble cast, went to seven actors from “Manito,” written and directed by Eric Eason, a gritty cinema verite drama about a Latino family’s hard times in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. And one for originality went to “Secretary,” directed by Steven Shainberg and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a young woman whose life brightens up when she welcomes the sadistic attentions of attorney James Spader.

Some of the most satisfying features at Sundance didn’t win anything, such as Finn Taylor’s hard-to-classify “Cherish,” one of the dramatic competition’s better films. A whimsical screwball comedy linked to a dark stalker scenario, “Cherish” (to be distributed by Fine Line) details the relationship between a woman under house arrest (Robin Tunney) and the man who comes to check her electronic bracelet (Tim Blake Nelson).

Though it screened outside the competition, “Coastlines” was one of the strongest and most involving dramatic films at Sundance, showing once again why Florida-based Victor Nunez is the most impressive of regional filmmakers. “This is where I’m from,” he said, “this is the only way I know how to make films.” A thoughtful melodrama about the dislocation caused when a hunk of an ex-con returns to the small town where the sheriff and the sheriff’s wife are his best friends, “Coastlines” mixes sense of place and the texture of everyday life with a menace-laden narrative about wanting to emotionally have it all.

On the documentary side, Rob Fruchtman and Rebecca Cammisa took the directing award for “Sister Helen,” about a holy terror of a Benedictine nun who began a halfway house for recovering addicts in the South Bronx. Filming the feisty sister, said Fruchtman, was “like riding a wild pony.” Added Cammisa, “we just basically showed up and she let it rip.”

Daniel B. Gold won the excellence in cinematography award for “Blue Vinyl,” which was co-directed by Judith Helfand and himself. Helfand, whose previous Sundance documentary “A Healthy Baby Girl” won a Peabody Award, has constructed that rare muckraking film with a sense of humor. Motivated by her parents’ decision to put vinyl siding on her childhood home, Helfand and Gold take a personal and scientific look at the perils of manufacturing and disposing of what some people call “the most environmentally hazardous consumer product on Earth.”

The documentary panel also gave out some special jury prizes. One went to documentary veteran Lourdes Portillo for “Senorita Extraviada,” her investigation into the mysterious slayings of between 200 and 400 young women in Juarez, Mexico. And another went to John Walter’s “How to Draw a Bunny,” a droll look at elusive, enigmatic underground figure Ray Johnson, sometimes known as “the most famous unknown artist in America.”

Not getting a prize but deserving one was Kristi Jacobson’s “American Standoff,” a deeply human, surprisingly heartbreaking look at a long and bitter ongoing strike the James P. Hoffa-led Teamsters are waging against Overnite, a powerful and union-hostile trucking company. Produced by Barbara Kopple, “Standoff” tells the always emotional stories of workers willing to give up everything they have for what they believe in.

Though the documentary field was especially strong this year, it doesn’t justify one of the best documentaries in the festival, Lucy Walker’s “Devil’s Playground,” being sadly left out of competition. Not only does “Playground” enter the rarely filmed Amish community, it deals in a poignant way with a little-known custom called rumspringa, where 16-year-old Amish kids are allowed to experience the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of the outside world before deciding whether to give themselves to their restrictive church forever. This examination of the life-changing question one teen calls “to be or not to be Amish” is haunting, provocative and unexpected.

Shown as a work in progress was “Only the Strong Survive,” the latest documentary by veterans Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, which, like a vibrant American “Buena Vista Social Club,” captures the performances of legendary rock and rhythm and blues stars like Wilson Pickett, Mary Wilson, Jerry Butler and Rufus and Carla Thomas, singers whose infectious music remains everything it ever was.

Documentaries also did well at the rival Slamdance Festival. “My Father, the Genius,” Lucia Small’s look at her dad, architect Glen Howard Small, was picked as the best documentary, while the audience feature award and a special jury honor went to Mark Moskowitz’s documentary “Stone Reader,” about the director’s search for the vanished author of a highly praised novel.

The best dramatic feature was Eitan Gorlin’s “The Holy Land,” about an Israeli rabbinical student who falls in love with a prostitute. (Some of these films will be shown at the American Cinematheque’s “Best of Slamdance” program at the Egyptian Theater on Feb. 6 and 7.)

It remained for director John Waters, a member of the Sundance dramatic jury, to put things in perspective. After listing several of the weird pastimes of characters in competition films, Waters tartly theorized that “if we didn’t act this out on film instead of in person, we’d all be in prison. And this wouldn’t be a film festival but a parole board hearing.”

Amen to that.