EDITOR’S NOTE: For live updates from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, go here. Below, you’ll find live updates from the 2010 Festival awards ceremony.GRAND JURY PRIZE: DRAMATICActress Parker Posey awarded this prize to Winter’s Bone.

Park City, UT – The 2010 Sundance Film Festival is pleased to announce that Obselidia, directed by Diane Bell, is the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P.

You hear something often enough, and it starts to seem true. And as the directors of Russian Lessons have known for at least as long as the Putin administration has been in power, when you’re part of the government-allied Russian media, people believe what you say even if it is rather strange.
As becomes immediately clear in Russian Lessons, investigative filmmakers Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya, the husband-and-wife directors ofthe hard-charging documentary, are not part of the mainstream Russian media.

“We’re all going to become straight,” HOWL co-director Rob Epstein blurted out near the end of the Queer Cinema’s Next Wave panel earlier this week. He was joking, of course, as he answered an audience member’s question about “where the community is moving as far as the stories that are going to be told” in the future. The panel, which was organized by Sundance Institute Associate GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and held at the Filmmaker Lodge on Tuesday, featured Epstein and his longtime co-director, Jeffrey Friedman; their HOWL producer Christine Walker; and New Frontier performance artist Kalup Linzy, who screened a clip from his alternately funny and trippy video series Sweet, Sampled, and LeftOva.

Novelist Russell Banks has been publishing books for nearly 40 years, but in terms of film he’s still something of a newcomer. In 1997, when he was well into his 50s and long suspicious of the business of movies, two of cinema’s most renowned auteurs, Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan, involved him in the process of adapting his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, respectively. Both films were critically acclaimed, and Banks has remained active within the world of independent film ever since.

I was a tad perplexed when I learned that Louis C.K., one of my favorite comics no one knows about, was premiering his standup film Louis C.

The Filmmaker Lodge was packed with people—and possibilities—as all nine filmmakers from this year’s inaugural NEXT section gathered together for the first time. With Sundance Film Festival’s newly minted Festival director, John Cooper moderating, the conversation was lively, insightful, and frequently silly.Cooper began by explaining the genesis of NEXT, citing the need to “carve out” a protected space in the Festival program for the burgeoning low- and no-budget filmmaking scene.

Part intimate profile of two determined women, part revealing glimpse into life in Iran, and part pulse-pounding sports film, Kick In Iran follows 20-year-old Taekwondo sensation Sara Khoshjamal-Fekri and her trainer Maryam Azarmehr as they train and fight for Olympic gold. Documentarian Fatima Geza Abdollahyan shoots these two fascinating women in their homes, in gender-segregated gyms, at prayer and play, and finally to the Olympic games in Beijing. Even though Iranian women are still discouraged from high-impact athletics, Sara’s success becomes its own agent for change.

The final days of the Sundance Film Festival see packed, final screenings of the more talked-about films. For David Michôd, director of Animal Kingdom, it was a bittersweet moment. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the response,” he said.

Regardless of the size and type of a film, music plays a crucial role in setting its tone. Whatever plays over the speakers alongside the image, actors, and script, is going to alter how the audience perceives the movie.The trick is enhancing the goals of the film, accompanying what the other aspects of the film are doing, while leaving room for the movie itself.

To cap off Sundance Film Festival U.S.A.

It would be cliché to list all the films that have been transformed by their scores. You know the ones I mean: Jaws, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon. BMI’s Sundance Film Festival roundtable discussion “Music and Film: The Creative Process” recognized the importance of a score to the film, and ingeniously brought together not just random composers and directors, but the composer-director pairs who had worked on many of this year’s Festival films.

Even if you attended all 10 days of the 2010 Festival, 186 movies (even if 73 of them are shorts) is a lot of movies, and that doesn’t include everything else the Festival and Park City offer: the panels, the trippy, immersive New Frontier on Main installations, the parties, and the snow begging you to frolic in it. There’s a way to not let the Festival’s wealth of culture overwhelm you, though: it’s entirely possible to make your own mini festival from the Festival at large. In a film festival that surrounds you with many ways to experience what’s going on in the world beyond just attending movie screenings, it’s easy to pick a topic and follow its thread throughout the Festival.

This week Sundance Film Festival audiences have been taken to other countries, other worlds, and other realities via the power of film, but this afternoon Anna Deavere Smith transported a crowd at the Egyptian Theatre through the bare essentials of theatre – voice, expression, and deep conviction.
As part of the festival’s Offscreen discussion series, Smith sat down with Michele Norris of NPR’s All Things Considered to talk about her career and craft. She also performed sections of her current one-woman play about health care, Let Me Down Easy, which was created, as with all of her plays, from a painstaking process of research and immersive impersonation.