Frozen River, King of Ping Pong, Man on Wire and Trouble the Water Earn Top Jury Prizes; Audience Favorites Feature Captain Abu Raed, Fields of Fuel, Man on Wire and The Wackness

Park City, UT–The jury and audience award-winners of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival were announced at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony hosted by William H. Macy in Park City, Utah. Films receiving jury awards were selected from the four feature-length Documentary and Dramatic competition categories by distinguished jurors. Films in these categories were also eligible for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards as selected by Film Festival audiences. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Sundance Channel, the Official Television Network of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, beginning Sunday, January 27 as well as on the Festival website, www.sundance.org/festival. more

Reality sets in, this last day of Sundance, as 50,000 attendees move on to greener pastures and the glistening snow-covered peaks encircling Park City once again seem a part of the natural landscape instead of a fancy festival backdrop. Down below on Main Street, festival dreams and destinies have intersected. All that remains is for this year’s festival to fade to memory.

Riffing off Barry Levinson’s Robert DeNiro-starrer about a harried Hollywood producer which premiered out-of-competition (I quite liked it), The Hollywood Reporter captured the received take on this year’s festival with its headline, “Stunned ‘dance: What Just Happened?” more

Gray skies persist and the big awards show arrives tomorrow night as Sundance 2008 draws to a close. Yet there are still surprises.

Last year I pulled out all the stops and attended thirty films in a week, my Sundance personal best. I took quiet pride in my diligence. Yet I still managed to miss Little Miss Sunshine and many other buzz-worthy films. Do the math and you’ll see why. If Sundance programs 120 films and I managed to see 30, then I’ve missed 75% of Sundance’s best programming despite my best efforts. That’s why it’s often hard to have a conversation here about what everyone’s seen in common. Often we haven’t. more

Overcast again. Blues skies aren’t forever.

A slow day. Overheard a klatch of industry veterans planning a Walmart release of the DVD of a festival film, a well-regarded but talky interview-style doc. Can’t see how it could appeal to a mass-market crowd, Walmart’s or otherwise. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere, the high altitude of Park City that causes Sundance’s storied reality dissociation. Over the years savvy buyers have learned to take a deep breath and count to ten (or ten days) before agreeing to a hype-inflated deal at Park City. Many have been burned in the past by acquisitions vibrant with Sundance buzz that sputter months later when introduced to the public. more

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.

No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.

Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!” as the lights dim.

Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here? more

Park City’s been overcast and gray since Day 1, but this morning a brilliant platinum light tore a hole in the endless cloud cover and ignited the overlooking Wasatch peaks, back-lighting a sparkly veil of glassy no-see-ums, tiny ice crystals too delicate to form flakes, that danced on wafts of air until they melted in my face.

Yes, I admit the night before I’d seen Academy-award nominee (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney’s latest masterwork, Gonzo, the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, but I deny any pharmaceutical inspiration, at least this early in the morning, as I stop before the Yarrow Hotel to marvel at this floaty, twinkly, sun-lit scrim. Inside the Yarrow a press screening of Morgan Spurlock’s latest saga-in-cheek, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, is almost underway, and I race into the theater to find a seat just as the lights fall.

Both docus, I’m happy to report, are polished to high theatrical sheen with eye-catching graphics, animated illustrations (the great Ralph Steadman in Gonzo), and well-crafted high-definition cinematography (D.P. Maryse Alberti in Gonzo). Both acquaint audiences with past and present avatars of U.S. politics: the tragic George McGovern, smarmy Richard Nixon, idealistic Jimmy Carter (Gonzo); the hubristic tag team of W. and Osama (Where in the World…). Both deserve and will likely obtain limited theatrical runs (though Sundance 2008 has been notably short of acquisitions so far). more

On Saturday I paid a visit to the production wing of the Sundance Institute Online, housed on the south end of Park Ave. in a century-old former miner’s hospital.

The festival’s daily newspaper has a home on the third floor of the same building, and the podcast department is in the basement. When I visited the second floor, a team of frazzled editors were putting the last touches on the interviews they’d shot the night before for the Live@Sundance video series.

The previous night, a team of Sundance videographers had shot three sequences between 10pm and midnight — it was the big U2 3D premiere. more

In Chimayo Friday night, when the blackout took down most of Main from for most of 90 minutes, people were cheerful in that resigned way that seems to be catching on all over. Of course the blackout only reinforced what every human in Park City already knows: there are more of us than ever. The Festival now sprawls across every logistical boundary, as the balance between people who are here to work and watch films, tips in favor of a limitless supply of people here for other reasons. For the last several years, this always comes up at the opening press conference as Robert Redford–in a kind of cheerful/resigned way–acknowledges the circus rings that orbit Sundance and says it’s still about the films. more

Day Three at the Avid booth and the Perfect Pitch contest provided festival goers the opportunity once again to pitch their best story lines for big prizes from Avid Technology (to see the list of prizes, click here). The following video is a pitch from Walter A. Carmona given live at the Avid booth in the New Frontier (333 Main). Give your pitch in New Frontier between noon and 4pm before Jan. 22!

Click here to download the Pitch (it’s about 30MB, so depending on your connection…).

(DivX Required–download it for free)

The Creative Coalition is holed up in Park City shooting various types of celebrity-delivered messages to fuel the Hallmark Channel’s “Watch With Me” campaign that supports television programming events which provide family viewing opportunities. (See examples on the Hallmark Channel website) The Coalition is getting footage at two locations in town from 11:00am to 4:00pm on Jan 19th and 20th.

On the second floor of the Treasure Mountain Inn Marvin Dorson, senior vice president of creative services at the Hallmark Channel is supervising the promotional video shoots for the “Watch With Me” campaign–acquiring footage with a Panasonic Varicam fitted with a Fujinon 22×7.8 BERM lens all supported on Sachtler sticks. The head-on footage is captured at 30fps and will be edited post-Park City on an Avid with certain cut-in graphic elements, then outputted for various online, DVD, and possibly television uses. more