The 2009 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony will have big shoes to fill namely, the cowboy boots belonging to 2008’s host, William H. Macy.
The theme of Saturday night’s closing event and reception was the Wild West. Decorations at the Park City Racquet Club included glowing sky-high Saguaro Cacti and pink and blue back-lit covered wagons featuring the silhouettes of dancing cowgirls. Macy dressed in a long black gunslinging coat and cowboy hat, with a lasso over his shoulder. “Nothing says Sundance like people dancing in colored wagons,” he began dryly, then launched into a perversely clever monologue that managed to incorporate all of the documentary and dramatic competition film titles while maintaining a narrative structure that involved him alone in a hotel room.
The absurdity of Macy’s costume and his humorous banter provided a welcome relief from the sobering subjects of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival award-winning films. The Documentary Grand Jury Prize-winning film, “Trouble the Water,” confronted the survival story of a rap artist and her husband trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters; The Dramatic Grand Jury Prize-winner, “Frozen River,” tells the story of a Mohawk Indian girl and a trailer park-dwelling mother who attempt to smuggle undocumented immigrants over the U.S. border from Canada. The Documentary Audience Award-winner, “Fields of Fuel,” takes a look at America’s addiction to oil; The Dramatic Audience Award-winner, “The Wackness,” centers on a troubled teenage drug dealer who trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist.
The subjects tackled by the winners of the world competition awards were a little less bleak. “Man on Wire,” about a French artist’s death-defying spectacle on a wire between New York’s Twin Towers, won both the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and The World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize. “Captain Abu Raed, a Jordan film about an aging airport janitor and storyteller mistaken for an airline pilot by a neighborhood of children, won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award; “King of Ping Pong,” a Swedish film about an ostracized teenager with a talent for ping pong, won The World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize.
Featured presenters included Macy’s wife, actress Felicity Huffman, and “Grey’s Anatomy” television star Sandra Oh and 2000’s “Pollock” and 2007’s “Into the Wild” star Marcia Gay Harden who presented via videotape. Harden, hamming it up for the camera, filmed hers laying belly-down, relaxing by a roaring fireplace in a hotel room.
Quentin Tarantino, who served on the U.S. Dramatic Competition Jury with Huffman and Oh, presented the final award to the cast and crew of “Frozen River.” Before announcing the winner, he assured the filmmakers in the audience that the decisions he and the other jury members had to make were tough and that he knew what it meant not to win at Sundance: 1992’s “Reservoir Dogs” went home empty handed.
“There’s a whole lot of people in the room — directors, actors who are not going to get awards,” he said. “Our joy is that you made our decisions so hard. Recognize right now that you are here tonight. Cinema baby!”
On a more serious note, Ken Brecker, executive director of the Sundance Institute, congratulated the filmmakers in the audience for their commitment to telling the narratives that capture “the pathos of this moment.”
Brecker said he ran into Dr. James Orbinski, founder of Doctors Without Borders and 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner, scribbling down some notes at this year’s festival and, after reading his words, decided to include them in his speech Saturday night:
“‘Stories. We all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do,” quoted Brecker. “‘If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we better choose them well.'”