The issues of the day were clearly on the minds of Sundance 2007's audiences and juries, as they collectively awarded some of the most topical films at the festival. Padre Nuestro, a dark thriller about two young Mexican men smuggled into New York City, won the feature grand jury prize at the festival, the second Mexican-themed film in a row to win the festival's top prize (last year's winner was the sweet-15 film Quinceañera). Grace Is Gone, a drama starring John Cusack as a father facing the daunting task of telling his two young daughters that their mother was killed in the Iraq war, won the coveted audience award, voted on by practically every person who saw the eligible films during the 10-day festival. Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
Feature documentary Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), which explores a vast network of corruption, kidnapping, and money-laundering frog farms in modern Brazil, took home the U.S. documentary jury prize. No End in Sight was awarded a special jury prize for its probing insight into the failures of the Bush administration's Iraq war policies. The film's director, Charles Ferguson, emphasized in his acceptance speech that he did not wish to make a political film, but he won thunderous applause by concluding with the statement that ''it might be too late for Iraq, but I hope it isn't too late for this country to conduct itself differently in the future.''
Directorial and real-life partners Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine won the doc jury prize for directing for their visually stunning film War/Dance, about a primary school in civil-war-torn northern Uganda that was invited for the first time to compete in the country's prestigious national music and dance competition. The U.S doc audience award winner, Hear and Now, was perhaps the most personal film among the year's winners — the director followed her parents, both deaf for 65 years, as they decided to undergo cochlear implant surgery and experience the sensation of sound for the first time in their lives.
Veteran documentarians also won recognition for their first forays into the world of feature films. The Pool, directed and co-written by Chris Smith (winner of Sundance 1999's doc jury prize for American Movie), won the special jury prize for singularity of vision for its tale of a ''room boy'' at a hotel in coastal India. Jeffrey Blitz (director of the Academy Award-nominated doc Spellbound) won the jury prize for directing for Rocket Science, a coming-of-age-in-Jersey dramedy that was among the most buzzed-about films at the outset of the festival.
Two as-yet-unknown actresses won awards for their performances, in an unusual split decision for the Sundance jury. Tamara Podemski won for her role as a city-wise Native American in Four Sheets to the Wind, and Jess Weixler won for what feature jury member and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell called ''a juicy performance'' in the vagina-dentata drama Teeth. Weixler accepted her award after arriving at the ceremony late from a last-minute flight back to Utah, breathlessly exclaiming, ''I'm glad that people connected with a woman who had teeth in her vagina.''
For more information on the winners, including the films in the global section of the festival, visit the Sundance 2007 website.
