The jury and audience award-winners of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival were announced at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony hosted by actor Jane Lynch in Park City, Utah. Films receiving jury awards were selected from the four categories: U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competition and World Dramatic and Documentary Competition. Films in these categories were also eligible for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards. The U.S. Audience Awards presented by Honda were announced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The World Cinema Audience Awards were announced by Benjamin Bratt. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Sundance Channel, the Official Television Network of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, beginning Sunday, January 25, as well as on the official Festival website, www.sundance.org/festival.

“This has been a truly remarkable year for Sundance in ways even we did not fully predict. We opened the Festival with animation and closed with science fiction, and in between showcased some of the best films we’ve ever seen,” says Geoffrey Gilmore, Director, Sundance Film Festival. “People ask us how independent film has evolved over the past 25 years and the answer is, quite simply, it’s better.”

“We knew this would be an historic year, given our anniversary and the inauguration,” says John Cooper, Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival. “But I have to say that adding to the excitement and experience was the selection of truly high quality films in this year’s competition. We were blown away and so were audiences.”

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival Juries consisted of:

U.S. Dramatic Competition:, Virginia Madsen, Scott McGehee, Maud Nadler, Mike White and Boaz Yakin; U.S. Documentary Competition: Patrick Creadon, Carl Deal, Andrea Meditch, Sam Pollard and Marina Zenovich; World Dramatic Competition: Colin Brown (U.S.), Christine Jeffs (New Zealand) and Vibeke Windeløv (Denmark); World Documentary Competition: Gillian Armstrong (Australia), Thom Powers (U.S.); Hubert Sauper (France); Shorts Competition: Gerardo Naranjo, Lou Taylor Pucci and Sharon Swart; The Alfred P. Sloan Prize: Fran Bagenal, Rodney Brooks, Raymond Gesteland, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Alex Rivera.

For the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, 118 feature-length films were selected including 91 world premieres, 16 North American premieres, and 5 U.S. premieres representing 21 countries with 42 first-time filmmakers, including 28 in competition. These films were selected from 3,661 feature- length film submissions composed of 1,905 U.S. and 1,756 international feature-length films.

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival Award Winners:

The Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Documentary was presented to We Live in Public, directed by Ondi Timoner. The film portrays the story of the Internet’s revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes of maverick web pioneer, Josh Harris, and his transgressive art project that shocked New York.

The Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Dramatic was presented to Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels and written by Damien Paul. The film tells the redemptive story of Precious Jones, a young girl in Harlem struggling to overcome tremendous obstacles and discover her own voice.

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to Rough Aunties, directed by Kim Longinotto. Fearless, feisty and unwavering, the ‘Rough Aunties’ protect and care for the abused, neglected and forgotten children of Durban, South Africa. United Kingdom

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to The Maid (La Nana), directed by Sebastián Silva. When her mistress brings on another servant to help with the chores, a bitter and introverted maid wreaks havoc on the household. Chile

The Audience Awards are presented to both a dramatic and documentary film in four Competition categories as voted by Sundance Film Festival audiences. The 2009 Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards are presented by Honda.

The Audience Award presented by Honda: U.S. Documentary was presented to The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos. The horrors of a secret cove nestled off a small, coastal village in Japan are revealed by a group of activists.

The Audience Award presented by Honda: U.S. Dramatic was presented to Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels and written by Damien Paul. The film tells the redemptive story of Precious Jones, a young girl in Harlem struggling to overcome tremendous obstacles and discover her own voice.

The World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary was presented to Afghan Star, directed by Havana Marking. After 30 years of war and Taliban rule, Pop Idol has come to television in Afghanistan: millions are watching and voting for their favorite singer. Marking’s film follows the dramatic stories of four contestants as they risk their lives to sing. Afghanistan/United Kingdom

The World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic was presented to An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by Nick Hornby. In the early 60s, a sharp 16-year-old with sights set on Oxford meets a handsome older man whose sophistication enraptures and sidetracks both her and her parents. United Kingdom

Directing Awards recognize excellence in directing for dramatic and documentary features.

The Directing Award: U.S. Documentary was presented to El General and director Natalia Almada. As great-granddaughter of President Plutarco Eliás Calles, one of Mexico’s most controversial revolutionary figures, the filmmaker paints an intimate portrait of Mexico.

The Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic was presented to Sin Nombre, written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Filmmaker Fukunaga’s first-hand experiences with Mexican immigrants seeking the promise of the U.S. form the basis of this epic Spanish-language dramatic thriller.

The World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary was presented to Afghan Star, directed by Havana Marking. After 30 years of war and Taliban rule, Pop Idol has come to television in Afghanistan: millions are watching and voting for their favorite singer. Marking’s film follows the dramatic stories of four contestants as they risk their lives to sing. Afghanistan/United Kingdom

The World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic was presented to Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel from a screenplay by Guy Hibbert. Two men from the same town but from different sides of the Irish political divide discover that the past is never dead. United Kingdom/Ireland

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award was presented to Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi for Paper Heart. Even though performer Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love, she bravely embarks on a quest to discover its true nature – a journey that takes on surprising urgency when she meets unlikely fellow traveler, actor Michael Cera.

The World Cinema Screenwriting Award was presented to Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel from a screenplay by Guy Hibbert. Two men from the same town but from different sides of the Irish political divide discover that the past is never dead. United Kingdom/Ireland

The U.S. Documentary Editing Award was presented to Sergio. Directed by Greg Barker and edited by Karen Schmeer, the film examines the role of the United Nations and the international community through the life and experiences of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The World Cinema Documentary Editing Award was presented to Burma VJ. Directed by Anders Østergaard and edited by Janus Billeskov Jansen and Thomas Papapetros. The film takes place in September 2007 as Burmese journalists risk life imprisonment to report from inside their sealed-off country. Denmark

The Excellence in Cinematography Awards honor exceptional cinematography in both dramatic and documentary categories.

The Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary was presented to The September Issue. With unprecedented access, director R.J. Cutler, cinematographer Bob Richman and their crew shot for nine months to capture editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and her team preparing the 2007 Vogue September issue, widely accepted as the “fashion bible” for the year’s trends.

The Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic was presented to Sin Nombre, written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Cinematographer: Adriano Goldman. Filmmaker Fukunaga’s first-hand experiences with Mexican immigrants seeking the promise of the U.S. form the basis of this epic Spanish-language dramatic thriller.

The World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary was presented to Big River Man, John Maringouin’s documentary about at an overweight, wine-swilling Slovenian world-record-holding endurance swimmer who resolves to brave the mighty Amazon in nothing but a Speedo. U.S.A./United Kingdom

The World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic was presented to An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig from a screenplay by Nick Hornby. Cinematographer: John De Borman. In the early 1960s, a sharp 16-year-old girl with sights set on Oxford meets a handsome older man whose sophistication enraptures and sidetracks both her and her parents. United Kingdom

A World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Originality was presented to Louise-Michel, directed by Benoit Delépine and Gustave de Kervern, about a group of disgruntled female French factory workers who, after the factory abruptly closes, pool their paltry compensation money to hire a hit man to knock off the corrupt executive behind the closure. France

A World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to Tibet in Song directed by Ngawang Choephel. Through the story of Tibetan music, this film depicts the determined efforts of Tibetan people, both in Tibet and in exile, to preserve their unique cultural identity. Choephel served six years of an 18-year prison sentence for filming in Tibet. Tibet

A World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Acting was presented to Catalina Saavedra for her portrayal of a bitter and introverted maid in The Maid (La Nana). Chile

A Special Jury Prize: U.S. Documentary was presented to Good Hair, directed by Jeff Stilson, in which comedian Chris Rock travels the world to examine the culture of African-American hair and hairstyles.

A Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence was presented to Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s farcical comedy about straight male bonding gone a little too far.

A Special Jury Prize for Acting was presented to Mo’Nique for her portrayal of a mentally ill mother who both emotionally and physically imprisons her daughter in Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire.

This year 118 features were programmed from 21 countries, including 42 first-time directors. U.S. submissions of feature-length films totaled 1,905. An additional 1,756 features were submitted from outside the U.S.

That makes a total of 3661 features submitted, or 230 days of screening if viewed in their entirety. How does Sundance manage it?

If you consider that the typical indie feature takes three to four years to write, fundraise, shoot, and post, and costs hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars—and that the odds of theatrical success not to mention recouping investment are slim to none—what drives this activity?

I’d like to see a post-doctoral study in applied economics that models the intrinsic motivation for this mass activity, absent evident extrinsic rewards. It might win a Nobel someday.

(It certainly wouldn’t include the closing night party which follows the awards. Once the crowning event of the Festival, a showy promenade of Festival filmmakers and VIPs, it’s now a blow-out for festival volunteers and whomever’s still hanging around. Catering this year consisted of trays of Apple cobbler, raw veggies on a skewer fit for rabbits, and miniature candy apples–think peanuts on a Delta flight.)

In spite of the fact that no one surviving a week of Sundance can physically attend more than 30 films out of about 120—at best a quarter of what’s presented each year–here are my Mondo picks for 2009. Apologies to those I missed or skipped.

Dramatic Must-See:

Most powerful nightmare: Johnny Mad Dog. Liberian child soldiers on a rampage. Little left to the imagination. Phenomenal performances and music/sound design. Seizes you by the neck and doesn’t let go.

Flat-out funniest: In The Loop. Sharpest, fastest writing, wittiest acting of the entire Festival. A parable of governments bumbling their way into a recent war. Lacerates everyone. Great turn by James Gandolfini as a raging Pentagon general. No one profanes the English language like the English. I’m ready to see it again.

Most charismatic adventure: Sin Nombre. Mexican filmmaking has been on a roll for several years. This includes actors and cinematographers as well as directors. Amazing performances, verisimilitude you know is truthful (although you’ve never chilled with a Honduran gang), plus the most beautiful wide-screen photography of trains against distant landscapes since David Lean. Focus Features is distributing this, hopefully to a theater near you.

Most charismatic inner journey: Humpday. Will they or won’t they? The fun is getting there, as two college buds, one now married and settled down, the other stroking his inner Jack Kerouac, drunkenly concoct an art project: two straight guys having sex on camera, starring themselves. Superb acting in one long emotional close-up.

Documentary Must-See:

Best thriller: The Cove. The original trainer of TV’s Flipper prepares a high-tech assault on a Japanese village with an awful secret: the mass slaughter of bottle-nose dolphins in a hidden cove. Weapon of choice: tiny HD camcorders to show the world what’s going on. No audience departed dry-eyed.

Best myth-making: We Live in Public. ‘90s dot-com millionaire and driving force behind Manhattan’s Pseudo.com Internet TV studios, Josh Harris, was always ahead of his times—or was he? My memory of those times and the people who inhabited them is different from what is presented here, but one thing is certain: as a gothic tale of metastasizing ego and sociopathic manipulation that would awe Machiavelli, this documentary has no equal.

Best restorative: The Yes Men Fix the World. And they do. From exposing corporate malfeasance (up to and including mass murder) in the case of Dow Chemical in Bhopal, India, to FEMA’s fecklessness in New Orleans, this dynamic duo raises use of false pretenses, hyperbolic impersonation, and public hoax to an art form. You won’t stop laughing–or marveling at their chutzpah.

Best videotaped stage play: Passing Strange. Not a documentary (as advertised) as much as a remarkable recording of the most vibrant Broadway rock musical to come along in ages. Spike Lee’s 2 hr. 15 min. version of writer/composer/performer Stew’s award-winning autobiographical coming-of-age jaunt from LA to Amsterdam to Berlin does everyone proud, especially the Sundance Institute, which nurtured this extraordinary musical from the outset. (Stew originated and workshopped “Passing Strange� at the Institute’s Theater, Screenwriter’s, and Director’s Labs.) Multicamera editing by long-time Spike collaborator Barry Alexander Brown is nothing short of masterful.

OK, that’s it. Over and out from Park City. Thanks for following my Sundance blog.

Let’s meet up again next year for Sundance 2010!

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In fact, the first email I received yesterday morning from a filmmaker friend said, “aren’t you glad Jeff Dowd doesn’t know about you?�

Dowd, a/k/a The Dude, a/k/a the Big Lebowski, apparently chased Variety’s John Anderson into a restaurant after Anderson indicated his dislike for Dirt! The Movie, a Documentary Competition film that Dowd is repping.

When Dowd wouldn’t let Anderson eat his dinner in peace, returning with Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling from The Howard Stern Show to reinforce his cause, Anderson started swinging. (You can read about the details here)

If you read Mondays’s blog, you know I didn’t much like Dirt! either. (“Documentary competition? What were they thinking?�).

Dowd’s passion often gets the best of him, but his heart is in the right place. I wish instead he were repping The Cove, a Documentary Competition rival which depicts a covert episode straight out of Mission Impossible (or Ocean’s Eleven—choose your comparison). Your mission, should you choose to accept: to document the slaughter of bottle-nosed dolphins in a secret cove near the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.

All concerned—various Japanese ministries, town officials—deny the slaughter takes place, so the man who first trained bottle-noses for the ‘60s TV show “Flipperâ€?–and who still blames himself for the subsequent popularity of trained dolphins in lucrative Sea World-type shows–recruits a small army of specialists—divers, surfers, electronics experts–to infiltrate the cove under cover of night and plant an arsenal of tiny HD camcorders (think Canon HV30) in fake rocks, underwater, even aboard an aerial blimp. Much of this furtive caper is captured with infrared cameras, adding an edge-of-your seat thrill as Japanese police give chase in the dark.

Their success, however, is heart-rending: we see the cove turn bright red as bleeding dolphins thrash about in their final agonies. It’s too much to watch.

The Japanese whaling industry is the bad guy here, so I couldn’t overlook the crowning irony that this exquisitely photographed film was made possible by Japanese technology, particularly the Sony optical-disc XDCAM PDW-F350 HD camcorder we see in several shots taken surreptitiously by others.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I wasn’t yet aware of any Sundance films shot with the RED ONE digital cinema camera. Well, I stand corrected. Sundance films shot with RED include the Polish brother’s Manure (DP’d by the extraordinary David Mullen), DP and now director Fraser Bradshaw’s Everything Strange and New, Dan Eckman’s Mystery Team, Emily Abt’s Toe To Toe, and Robert Siegel’s (writer of The Wrestler) Big Fan. The last two are in the Dramatic Competition.

And at Slamdance, Jordan Galland’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead was shot using RED ONE.

(Thanks to DP Jendra Jarnagin for setting me straight.)

I went to the Yarrow’s theater to catch a press screening of Manure only to be denied the pleasure. Manure had apparently been withdrawn at the last minute. Rumor had it that the title itself was being reconsidered.

While spinning my wheels in the Yarrow lobby wondering what to do next, I bumped into Denise Kasell, there also to see Manure. A former director of the Hamptons Film Festival, Denise is the new executive director of The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass., a leading Northeast art house cinema with four screens.

Denise had arrived two days before the festival began to attend the Sundance Institute’s Art House Project “Convergence,� a conference at the historic Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City that drew owners and operators of 51 independent art houses and nonprofit screening venues from across the country, plus bookers, filmmakers, and producers like Ted Hope, whose closing remarks addressed possible new distribution models for indies in the next few years.

At present 18 theaters are officially members of the project, including the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn, the Jacob Burns north of New York, the Enzian in Orlando, the Hollywood in Portland, the Michigan in Ann Arbor, and of course Denise Kasell’s Coolidge Corner in Brookline.

Established in 2006, the Art House Project is perhaps the Sundance Institute’s most important and timely new initiative, because no one doubts that art houses whether for-profit or nonprofit are a critically endangered species.

Sundance’s John Cooper put it best in his opening remarks to the Convergence (I’m paraphrasing): “Art houses are the real heroes, who do for 365 days a year what we do for 10 days a year.�

Since every community blessed with an active local art house wants to preserve it, the Sundance Institute will reap lasting gratitude from art house audiences across the country if the Art House Project succeeds.

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Tonight I decided to pack it in early and head back to the condo. I’m beat. Last night I’d jammed on electric guitar until 6 a.m. at New York entertainment attorney Jonathan Gray’s condo, a yearly tradition for which he supplies guitars and amps–always a Sundance highlight of mine. (This year Jonathan has legal credits in twelve Sundance dramas including Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, Against the Current, and Big Fan.)

At the Main Street bus terminal I waited and waited in a light drizzle for the No. 7 bus to Kimball Junction. A young man soon joined me. He wore a droopy dark jacket over a black tee with a huge white skull like Jack Skellington’s. A silver ring protruded from his lower lip and lanky black hair fell from his side part across his forehead. While waiting, I asked what films he’d seen. He loved World Cinema Dramatic Competition entry “Louis-Michel,� saying it reminded him of the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet who directed one of his two favorite films, Amélie. He had tickets to The Informers and Moon in the Premieres section, both of which he was anxious to see in the morning.

He wanted to know what I thought of Humpday, since one of its leads, Mark Duplass, is half of the mumblecore writer/director team (Baghead, The Puffy Chair) of brothers Jay and Mark Duplass. (Mumblecore is a character-based, often improvised low-budget digital genre associated with the ennui of 20-somethings, analogous to Emo in music.) I replied that the acting was pitch perfect, and that the other male lead, the charming Josh Leonard of Blair Witch Project, had mischievously managed to channel his inner Dennis Hopper. The young man grinned.

Humpday is about two straight guys who drunkenly agree to have sex with each other as performance art, then later, when sober, must convince themselves to go through with it. It was snapped up Monday by Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures in a novel distribution deal: a video-on-demand release next summer and a theatrical run a month later. (Very little has been picked up this year at Sundance, which the trade press has commented on all week.)

On the bus at last, we chatted about films and Sundance panel discussions until I reached my stop. I asked what he was doing here at Sundance. And here’s the punch line:

He’s a high school senior from Westport, Connecticut, who flew here on his own. He’d taken some filmmaking workshops at the Westport Art Center and is interested in filmmaking. As I handed him my business card (offering future advice if ever he wished it), I could tell by his shy, startled look this was the first business card he’d ever been handed!

All parties end. Especially when it comes to nonprofit arts foundations in the United States that rely on nongovernmental patronage to support independent dance, theater, film, etc. All it takes is a Bernie Madoff or a severe economic downturn…

Generational tastes shift as well. Democratic, even revolutionary, ideals of the activist ‘60s generation that gave impetus to the Sundance Institute in the first place have cooled over time, dinged by the Reagan and Bush eras, the culture wars, the aging and dying off of ‘60s activists themselves.

Who in 1985, the year the Sundance Institute launched its film festival, could have predicted the promotional reach of the Internet and Web? Does indie filmmaking any longer require validation, as it did 25 years ago? Is it still a movement or another marketing tool? Can the juggernaut version of the Sundance Film Festival survive indefinitely?

These thoughts swirled in my head all week as I traversed empty sidewalks and attended half-empty public and industry screenings that would have been packed a year ago (in spite of a writers strike and William Morris deserting the festival). The absence this year of swag and stretch limos didn’t faze me, but the disappearance of many industry stalwarts I’ve known over the years, including nonprofit staff, distributors, critics–many newly unemployed–programmers, producers, and cinematographers threw me for a loop. (Equally disconcerting were festival badges bearing the name Clorox—Clorox subsidiary Brita, in the water business, is a Sustaining Sponsor this year.)

The Sundance Film Festival is nothing if not a perennial gathering of the tribe—the paramount business convention of indie filmmakers in the U.S.

Which is why my conversation with the young man on the bus, too young to shave, was unexpectedly uplifting.

If the future of indie filmmaking (or whatever succeeds it) is in his hands, Sundance will thrive another 25 years easily.

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Company 3, which provides DI color grading and other post services for films, has a strong presence at this year’s Sundance Film Festival having handled final grading for four films featured in the fest. Among them is Antoine Fuqua’s violent cop drama Brooklyn’s Finest, which was the first film sold at this year’s Sundance, going to Sony Pictures and Senator Entertainment. The DI grade for that film was performed by Company 3’s Stefan Sonnenfeld, who worked in conjunction with cinematographer Patrick Murguia.

Company 3 DI colorist David Hussey handled the grade for another highly anticipated film, 500 Days of Summer, a romantic comedy from former music video director Marc Webb. The film, drawing rave reviews, stars Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a tale of a woman who doesn’t believe in love and the man who falls for her. Eric Steelberg was the cinematographer on the film.

Colorist Shane Harris graded two films, Shrink, director Jonas Pate’s Hollywood expose starring Kevin Spacey, and The Killing Room, a thriller from director Jonathan Liebesman about people unwittingly caught in a bizarre lab experiment. Harris worked with cinematographer Lukas Ettin on both projects.

Company 3 established itself as the leader in DI color grading through its breakthrough work on blockbusters such as Pirates of the Caribbean, 300 and Dreamgirls. Recently, however, it has been attracting more work among higher end independent films as DI technology has advanced and more filmmakers have discovered the merits and efficiencies of digital post production.

These annual awards were created in 1996 by Sundance Institute in partnership with NHK to celebrate 100 years of cinema and to honor and support emerging independent filmmakers. Each year the Award supports winners from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) in realizing their next projects. The four winners will be presented with the award at the annual Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony on Saturday, January 24.

The winning director from each region will receive a $10,000 award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights upon completion of their project. NHK is Japan’s largest broadcaster with five 24-hour TV and three radio channels. In addition, the Sundance Institute staff will work closely with the award recipients throughout the year, providing ongoing support and assistance in seeking out opportunities to finance and distribute their projects.

The winning filmmakers and projects are: Diego Lerman, Ciencias Morales (Moral Sciences) from Argentina; David Riker, The Girl from the United States; Qurata Kenji, Speed Girl from Japan; and Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Evolution from France.

“We are thrilled by the quality of this year’s winning filmmakers, all of whom embody what the award is about. In an extremely competitive year, these projects are exceptionally original and challenging,” says Alesia Weston, Associate Director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, International.

“The Sundance/ NHK award is part of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program’s year-round commitment to support singular voices in world cinema,â€? added Michelle Satter, Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program. “We expect that the vision and innovative storytelling of this year’s four winners will resonate far beyond their countries of origin.”

Past recipients of the Sundance/NHK Filmmakers award include: Alex Rivera, THE SLEEP DEALER (USA); Miranda July, ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (USA); Andrucha Waddington, THE HOUSE OF SAND (Brazil); Lucrecia Martel, LA CIENAGA (Argentina); Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, WHISKY (Uruguay); Walter Salles, CENTRAL STATION (Brazil); György Pálfi, TAXIDERMIA (Hungary); Fernando Eimbcke with LAKE TAHOE (Mexico); The 2008 recipients were: Alejandro Fernandez Almendras, HUACHO (Chile); Braden King, HERE (USA); Aiko Nagatsu, APOPTOSIS (Japan); and Radu Jude, THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (Romania). Recent winners Kanji Nakajima with CLONE RETURNS THE HOMELAND (Japan) and Cruz Angeles with DON’T LET ME DROWN (USA) will premiere in competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

The Winners of the 2009 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award are:

Diego Lerman/Ciencias Morales (Argentina) – During the last years of the military dictatorship, a sexually repressed school monitor in Buenos Aires indulges in a strange compulsion, allowing her dark desires to compromise her role at the school.

Born in Buenos Aires, Lerman’s first feature film, Tan de Repente (Suddenly) won more than 30 international prizes, including the Silver Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival, The Jury Special and the Public Awards at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival and Best Film and Best Actress in La Habana International Film Festival. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and was selected for New Directors New Films and Karlovy Vary. His short films include La Prueba (1999) and La Guerra de Los Gimnasios (The War of the Gyms) selected for both the Locarno Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His documentary Servicios Prestados premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2008.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic/Evolution (France) – A group of young boys who are isolated from the world act as guinea pigs in a series of bizarre medical procedures intended to trigger a reverse evolutionary step. Evolution depicts the attempts of one young, unruly test subject as he seeks to escape experimentation and recall his clouded past.

Hadzihalilovic studied cinema at La Fémis, the French state film school. In 1990, she founded the production company, Les Cinémas de la Zone with Gaspar Noé, through which she produced the films Carne and I Stand Alone, as well as her own short films. In 1996, she produced and directed the short film MIMI, which was shown at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, Cannes and Toronto. Her first feature Innocence (2004) won numerous awards, including Best First Film at San Sebastian Film Festival, and Best Film and Best Photography at Stockholm Film Festival.

David Riker/The Girl (USA) – A young, single mother from South Texas is thrown into an unexpected and life-changing journey when her attempt to smuggle immigrants across the border ends disastrously, leaving her stranded with a young girl from southern Mexico.

Riker is a New York-based filmmaker currently living in Mexico. His debut feature, The City won awards at the Havana, San Sebastian, and Human Rights Watch International Film Festivals. Riker received the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival as co-writer of the feature film Sleep Dealer. He attended the 2007 Screenwriters Lab with The Girl and is a recipient of the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Annenberg Fellowships.

Qurata Kenji/Speed Girl (Japan) – Nijiko, a gifted speed skater, runs through the world at full speed, leaving her friend Mitsuo in her wake. When Nijiko mysteriously disappears, Mitsuo learns what it means to look out for someone in love and prayer.

Qurata Kenji started making films in 1992 and established the production company EGT in 1993. Qurata produced commercials, developed projects for late night TV, and was involved in the development and production of various feature films, including Seishun Dorobo (Youth Robber), Mystery Ofakane-Cho, Yurei Shojyo Gakshou Dan (The Ghost Choir Girls). He went on to direct promotional and concert videos, as well as establishing Coyote, a cooperative for the development of films.

It was bad enough years ago when the main theater circuit was the Egyptian on Main Street, the Holiday Village multiplex near Albertson’s, and the makeshift auditorium in the Prospector. With luck—meaning the shuttle-bus gods deemed to smile on you—you could dash between them in 20 minutes. Or jump in your car and zoom off, which I did often.

Then came the Olympics. Park City built a bus terminal behind Main Street to accommodate the crush. One consequence is that Main Street buses no longer stop along Main Street, adding additional walking time to wherever you need to go on Main. Building new bus routes for the Olympics meant that festival shuttles no longer stopped in front of the Holiday Village cinemas either. Instead, you must now debus (is that a word?) in front of the Yarrow Hotel and make a mad dash across the Yarrow’s parking lot, hurtling into the Holiday Village cinemas breathless and snow-encrusted if you slipped on the ice.

Cars were banned from Main Street too, and were now towed from the Yarrow’s and Albertsons’ parking lots. The message was clear: don’t bring cars into Park City during Sundance. Your alternatives? Those jolting buses, or scarce cabs with price-gouging habits that would embarrass Bronx livery drivers.

To make matters worse, a couple of years ago the outlying Park City Racquet Club, familiar from years of Festival awards ceremonies, was added as a theater, and this year a new synagogue, Temple Har Shalom, even farther afield, became the Festival’s latest screen. As bus routes elongated to accommodate these new venues, the rambling Theatre Loop took longer and longer—both to arrive and to get anywhere. (To get to the new Temple theater, you take a bus to get to another bus that shuttles you there.) So much for seeing more than a handful of films each day at Sundance.

What I’m really getting at, however, is that Sundance makes for strange busfellows. (Is that a word?) You spend so much time trapped on them, you end up eventually bumping into all your friends and making plenty of new ones too. (How years ago I met Ted Schilowitz, now “Leader of the Rebellionâ€?—his card actually says this–of RED Digital Cinema.)

Extemporaneous exchanges among riders form a sort of coffee klatsch on wheels, sprinkled with endless overheard conversation, much of it anonymous and terribly, terribly frank, about actors, films, and filmmakers.

No wonder Sundance bus rides have become the de facto Festival grapevine, easily overtaking the official Daily Insider newspaper. How ingenious of Sundance to bring us all together in this truly democratic way!

Today, for instance, I met a Miami-NYC producer (Sundance veteran with past films at the festival) on a bus detouring past the Park City Resort Center, who said he’d just come from Slamdance, where he’d seen Finding Bliss, a lark about an idealistic film school grad who jams her foot in the industry’s door by editing porn, and Weather Girl, about a Seattle TV meteorologist who flips out on-camera when she learns her boyfriend–the morning anchorman—is a cheat.

“It rounds out the festival experience,� he said, to attend a Slamdance screening, adding “it makes you feel like you’ve been to an indie festival.� I inquired and he replied that the Slamdance screenings he’d attended were “packed.�

How long, I mused to myself as the bus rattled on from stop to stop, before Sundance invites Slamdance to officially join the party, much as the Berlinale did to what is now its long-established experimental Forum section, or Cannes did to Director’s Fortnight, both of which were born during the tumult of 1968 as anti-festivals to overturn the established festivals they were ultimately folded into?

Back to reality: Sometimes riding the bus you hear more than you want to.

Young woman, mid-20s, Valley-style upspeak:

“I have the best Facebook story? So this girl I went to school with? When I was in first and second grade? She got in touch with me by Facebook. I hadn’t seen her since the first or second grade. We were friends then. And she got in touch with me because her father had been in the witness protection program and she couldn’t get in touch with anyone. But now she can. You know, I’m from New Jersey.�

Now there’s a Sundance storyline, free for the making.

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It was bad enough years ago when the main theater circuit was the Egyptian on Main Street, the Holiday Village multiplex near Albertson’s, and the makeshift auditorium in the Prospector. With luck—meaning the shuttle-bus gods deemed to smile on you—you could dash between them in 20 minutes. Or jump in your car and zoom off, which I did often.

Then came the Olympics. Park City built a bus terminal behind Main Street to accommodate the crush. One consequence is that Main Street buses no longer stop along Main Street, adding additional walking time to wherever you need to go on Main. Building new bus routes for the Olympics meant that festival shuttles no longer stopped in front of the Holiday Village cinemas either. Instead, you must now debus (is that a word?) in front of the Yarrow Hotel and make a mad dash across the Yarrow’s parking lot, hurtling into the Holiday Village cinemas breathless and snow-encrusted if you slipped on the ice.

Cars were banned from Main Street too, and were now towed from the Yarrow’s and Albertsons’ parking lots. The message was clear: don’t bring cars into Park City during Sundance. Your alternatives? Those jolting buses, or scarce cabs with price-gouging habits that would embarrass Bronx livery drivers.

To make matters worse, a couple of years ago the outlying Park City Racquet Club, familiar from years of Festival awards ceremonies, was added as a theater, and this year a new synagogue, even farther afield, became the latest festival screen. As bus routes elongated to accommodate these new venues, the rambling Theatre Loop took longer and longer—both to arrive and to get anywhere. (To get to the new Temple theater, you take a bus to get to another bus that shuttles you there.) So much for seeing more than a handful of films each day at Sundance.

What I’m really getting at, however, is that Sundance makes for strange busfellows. (Is that a word?) You spend so much time trapped on them, you end up eventually bumping into all your friends and making plenty of new ones too. (How years ago I met Ted Schilowitz, now “Leader of the Rebellionâ€?—his card actually says this–of RED Digital Cinema.)

Extemporaneous exchanges among riders form a sort of coffee klatsch on wheels, sprinkled with endless overheard conversation, much of it anonymous and terribly frank, about actors, films, and filmmakers.

No wonder Sundance bus rides have become the de facto Festival grapevine, easily overtaking the official Daily Insider newspaper. How ingenious of Sundance to bring us all together in this truly democratic way!

Today, for instance, I met a Miami-NYC producer (Sundance veteran with past films at the festival) on a bus detouring past the Park City Resort Center, who said he’d just come from Slamdance where he’d seen Finding Bliss, a lark about an idealistic film school grad who jams her foot in the industry’s door by editing porn, and Weather Girl, about a Seattle TV meteorologist who flips out on-camera when she learns her boyfriend–the morning anchorman—is a cheat.

“It rounds out the festival experience,� he said, to attend a Slamdance screening, and “it makes you feel like you’ve been to an indie festival.� I inquired and he replied that the Slamdance screenings he’d attended were “packed.�

How long, I mused to myself as the bus rattled on from stop to stop, before Sundance invites Slamdance to officially join the party, much as the Berlinale did to what is now its long-established experimental Forum section, or Cannes did to Director’s Fortnight, both of which were born during the tumult of 1968 as anti-festivals to overturn the established festivals they were ultimately folded into?

Back to reality: Sometimes riding the bus you hear more than you want to.

Young woman, mid-20s, Valley-style upspeak:

“I have the best Facebook story? So this girl I went to school with? When I was in first and second grade? She got in touch with me by Facebook. I hadn’t seen her since the first or second grade. We were friends then. And she got in touch with me because her father had been in the witness protection program and she couldn’t get in touch with anyone. But now she can. You know, I’m from New Jersey.�

Now there’s a Sundance storyline, free for the making.

.

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival announced the jury prizes in shorts filmmaking based on outstanding achievement and merit. The Sundance Film Festival runs January 15-25, 2009 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Full awards will be announced the evening of January 24th at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony at the Park City Racquet Club. Actress Jane Lynch will serve as Master of Ceremonies.

The 2009 Short Film jurors are Gerardo Naranjo (Director/Writer/Producer: Voy a explotar, Malachance, Perro Negro); Lou Taylor Pucci (Actor: Thumbsucker); and Sharon Swart (Variety).

The Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking was awarded to Short Term 12, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. The Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking was given to Lies, directed by Jonas Odell. The Shorts Jury awarded Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking to The attack of the robots from Nebula-5, directed by Chema Garcia Ibarra; Protect You + Me, directed by Brady Corbet; Western Spaghetti, directed by PES; Jerrycan, directed by Julius Avery; Love You More, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, I Live in the Woods, directed by Max Winston, Omelette, directed by Nadejda Koseva; and Treevenge, directed by Jason Eisener.

Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking

Short Term 12 (Director: Destin Daniel Cretton)—A film about kids and the grown-ups who hit them.

Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking

Lies/Sweden (Director: Jonas Odell)—Three perfectly true stories about lying. In three episodes based on documentary interviews we meet the burglar who, when found out, claims to be a moonlighting accountant, the boy who finds himself lying and confessing to a crime he didn’t commit and the woman whose whole life has been a chain of lies.

Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking

The attack of the robots from Nebula-5/Spain (Director: Chema García Ibarra)—”Almost” everybody is going to die very soon.

I Live In The Woods (Director: Max Winston)—A Woodsman’s fast-paced journey, fueled by happiness, slaughter, and a confrontation with America’s God.

Jerrycan/Australia (Director and Screenwriter: Julius Avery)—While attending a party, five bored kids decide to blow something up. A childhood game seals the fate of Nathan, who risks everything after he is bullied, and is forced to make a life and death decision.

Love You More/UK (Director: Sam Taylor-Wood; Screenwriter: Patrick Marber)—Two teenagers are drawn together by the Buzzcocks’ single ‘Love You More’ during the summer of 1978.

Omelette/Bulgaria (Director: Nadejda Koseva; Screenwriter: Georgi Gospodinov)—While a woman makes an omelette we learn how difficult it is to make ends meet.

Protect You + Me (Director: Brady Corbet)—A reminder of a long-forgotten event, combined with a challenging situation, provokes a man to extreme action.

Treevenge/Canada (Director: Jason Eisener; Screenwriter: Rob Cotterill)—Sometimes Christmas is worth crying over.

Western Spaghetti (Director: PES)—Everyday objects become delicious ingredients as we learn how to cook spaghetti through stop-motion.

This year the Festival’s Short Film Program was comprised of a record 96 short films from 5,632 submissions, from U.S. and international filmmakers. Submissions grew by 10% over last year. Due to the strong submissions this year, the Shorts Program was expanded to accommodate the quality of work submitted. The 2009 award winners and honorable mentions exemplify Sundance’s commitment to discovering new talent and accomplished storytelling and filmmaking.

Based on a book of fiction, Push tells the story of an overweight, withdrawn 16-year-old Harlem girl named Precious, pregnant with a second child by her own father and abused at home by her mother (searingly played by comedienne Mo‘Nique, who will surely win awards). Without spilling the plot, through creative writing Precious achieves a degree of selfhood, and the film ends in as much emotional uplift as possible given the circumstances.

If this storyline sounds especially dark, be assured that a sense of humor pervades the plot, and there was much audience laughter in places, thanks no doubt to Lee Daniel’s obvious ease and rapport with his actors, who contributed fully fleshed-out performances. During the Q&A afterwards Daniels also established an instant rapport with the overflow crowd. Not because he is African-American on Obama Day but because as a director he is clearly a rising star. It was obvious to everyone there.

Another new director whose star blazes bright at Sundance 2009 is Cary Fukunaga, whose Sin Nombre (No Name) is about a young Mexican gang member with a reluctant conscience, fleeing aboard freight trains for the U.S. border with a girl in tow whose life he saved by slaying his own gang leader. No way this story is going to end well, but Fukunaga’s stunningly cinematic 2.40 widescreen photography and ability to draw both emotional complexity and visceral performances from his Mexican cast (so perfectly cast, it’s hard to believe they’re acting) had me thinking equal parts Carlos Reygadas, Fernando Meirelles, Quentin Tarantino, and photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Sin Nombre, listed as a USA/Mexico co-production from Universal’s art house division Focus Features, is also in Sundance’s dramatic competition and could do respectable business at the box office on the basis of its powerful storytelling once word-of-mouth gets out.

Since this is a blog that concerns itself with developments in technology as well as form, it’s worth noting that both Push and Sin Nombre were shot in 35mm with a D.I. finish, while all of the documentaries I’ve seen so far were shot in HD and projected as HD. It’s also worth noting that, in general, the overall quality of photography and lighting, whether film- or digital-based, is at an all-time high. Gone forever, it seems, are golf-ball sized film grain and milky underexposure, or the stair-stepping (aliasing) of diagonal detail common to DV camcorders five years ago. Credit goes, I presume, to Kodak for faster, finer film stocks, to Japan Inc. for all the latest incredible HD camcorders, and to today’s film schools, which often provide the same cameras to students that professionals make a living with. The Bolex era of student filmmaking is but a distant memory.

Did I leave out RED? I didn’t mean to—I’ve seen all 4.5 hours of Soderbergh’s Che twice–although I’ve yet to learn of any films at Sundance 2009 shot with the RED ONE. But whether or not there are RED projects at Sundance this year, its disruptive technology cum marketing are already impacting both low- and medium-budget filmmaking, threatening to turn high-end film and digital cameras and the camera houses that rent them into a distant memory too.

To wit, I had an enlightening conversation with Tom Fletcher of Chicago/Detroit-based Fletcher Camera at the New Frontier on Main (the annual Sundance tech showcase, this year emphasizing video art installations in a series called “Artists and Scientists�). Tom is unique among camera rental facility owners in that he actually attends Sundance each year to gain insight into trends in indie film production. (He loves the films too.) And what he had to say this year isn’t comforting.

Fletcher Camera (www.fletch.com), he explained, owns a RED ONE and has eight more on consignment, available as needed. The problem on the horizon for the camera rental business is that the body of the RED ONE, which boasts a Super-35mm sensor that can capture a 4K image many times larger than HD, is so affordable at $17,500 that a new class of owner-operators has already sprung up.

As a result, per Tom, camera assistants spend all day at his facility hobnobbing with staff and soliciting free technical advice when all they intend to rent is a matte box or a 35mm cine lens for their RED ONE. That’s not a sustainable business model for a camera rental house, so Tom is rethinking his business, imagining it as a service business someday, dispensing technical supervision for a cost. In the meantime, renting PL-mount cine lenses ought to remain a good business (a single prime lens can cost $20,000) even as RED ONE cameras proliferate. Tom says he’s going to rename his business Fletcher Lenses and Cameras.

You see, change is a two-edged sword. To get change, something else must change first. I would hate to see large camera houses compromised by a drop-off in camera rentals due to cheap digital alternatives (Canon’s recent 5D Mark II SLR with its 35mm-sized sensor takes impressive HD video for less than $3000). That would inevitably mean fewer choices and less flexibility for those of us in production, film or digital.

Whatever the future brings, change in a shifting world can only be resisted for so long. My day began early this morning at The Spur Bar and Grill on Main Street at a gathering hosted by legendary producer’s rep Jeff Dowd (inspiration for “The Big Lebowksi�). As Obama took his historic oath of office, the room choked up and the tears flowed freely.

Because that’s a change we can believe in, on this Obama Day in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival.

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