News Feature - Sundance Film Festival 2006: Grand Jury and Audience Awards

While the biggest news coming out of this year's Sundance Film Festival has been the big-money studio acquisitions of such star-studded indies as Little Miss Sunshine and The Night Listener, the annual Sundance Awards ceremony on Saturday night made even bigger news by bestowing their highest honors on two of the least high profile films in the festival's 2006 line-up - the drama Quinceanera and the documentary God Grew Tired of Us.

In a press release, Geoffrey Gilmore, the Director of the Sundance Film Festival, stated that, "This year we've seen a number of films that deal sensitively with the timely and complex issues of cultural assimilation and community. Clearly, these compelling stories along with the quality of filmmaking have resonated with audiences and jury members alike."

Written and directed by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, Quinceanera follows the troubled life of a pregnant fifteen-year-old Mexican girl living in Los Angeles' rapidly gentrifying Echo Park neighborhood. The film won both the Sundance Grand Jury Award and the Audience Award for a Dramatic Feature. During his acceptance speech, Westmoreland commented that, "This is a very little film ... Sundance is like a microscope. It can take something very small and make it very big, and that's what you've done for us."

Though there hadn't been significant award buzz surrounding Quinceanera before Saturday's ceremony - at least, not outside of Sundance - the early reviews had been overwhelmingly positive, with Kim Voynar from Cinematical lauding the movie as, "the kind of film that Sundance is all about - an independent film made with a cast full of unknown, actors giving natural and authentic performances." Additionally, the Hollywood Reporter called Quinceanera "enormously entertaining" and Variety labeled it "a fresh, spirited drama, charming and unpretentious."

The Grand Jury Prize for documentary went to Christopher Quinn's God Grew Tired of Us, a glimpse into the lives of three Sudanese refugees who fled from Africa in the midst of their home country's brutal civil war and resettled in America, where they struggle to adjust to Western values and lifestyles. The early word-of-mouth coming out of Sundance for Quinn's documentary had been strong, with Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells commenting that, "I don't care if this sounds intemperate, but feelings of humanitarian compassion and dmiration for these three Sudanese men...indeed, for the indominability of the human spirit...flooded the Holiday Cinemas theatre where God played late [Tuesday] afternoon." Like Quinceanera, God Grew Tired of Us also walked away with the Sundance Audience Award - the first time in Sundance history that a documentary has been awarded both honors.

However, despite the critical praise that both films received, some pundits admitted surprise that such relatively obscure features took home so many Sundance honors. Wells mentioned that, "Day after day and hour after hour during the Sundance Film Festival I asked every journalist, distributor and agent I ran into what they'd seen and liked (or half-liked). I must have asked this question 60 or 70 times over the eight days I was up there...And nobody mentioned Quinceanera ... It was like it didn't exist...one of those strugglers that sometimes get lost in the shuffle." Before the awards were announced, New York Times reporter John Clark offered his own assessment of the Sundance Award selection criteria, noting that, "It is generally understood that Sundance juries, which are composed of independent filmmakers, actors and actresses, producers, journalists and others associated with low-budget moviemaking, are sympathetic to films that have little chance in the marketplace. After all, many of the jury members were once struggling (and in some cases still are). As a result, they will sometimes give the top prize not to the best film in competition but to the best film that needs help the most. In fact, one of the real values of the prize is that it can rescue a film or a filmmaker from oblivion."

However, not all film critics agree with Sundance's top honors for 2006, with Variety's Todd McCarthy complaining that, "Geoffrey Gilmore spoke about this year's lineup as a 'back to its roots' event filled with films 'as independent as we've had in many years.' The way the fest turned out, 'roots' and 'independent' must be read as code for small, visually unambitious and socially concerned about the same sorts of issues Sundance entries have been addressing for years."

Yahoo offered this summary of the other Sundance award winners for dramatic features: "Gela Babluani's French thriller 13 Tzameti, which garnered the World Cinema Jury Prize; Toa Fraser's No. 2, a New Zealand film about a Fijian widow who takes her family on a trip to the South Pacific, which scored the World Cinema Audience Award; and A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which earned the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Performance and Directing Award for first-timer Ditto Montiel. The drama, about a man reflecting back on his childhood growing up in a rough part of Queens in the 1980s, stars Robert Downey Jr., Rosario Dawson, Dianne Wiest and Chazz Palmintieri." Meanwhile, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award - awarded to The Squid and the Whale's Noah Baumbach last year - went to writer-director Hilary Brougher for her drama Stephanie Daley.

For a full listing of the rest of the winners at this year's Sundance Film Festival, check out the official Sundance web site.