PARK CITY, UTAH — At the Sundance Film Festival, 2008 became a banner year for large bodies of water as "Frozen River" took the grand jury prize for drama and "Trouble the Water" walked off with the top documentary award at the fest's closing-night ceremonies Saturday at the Racquet Club here.
Written and directed by Courtney Hunt and set in upstate New York, "Frozen River" costars a magnificent Melissa Leo and Misty Upham as two women who face desperate economic straits and turn to smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border. Acquired at the festival by Sony Pictures Classics, this is a powerful story that makes strong emotional connections.
"Trouble the Water," co-directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, starts with the harrowing home movie footage that New Orleans resident Kim Roberts shot of Hurricane Katrina and evolves into a remarkable story of community resilience in the face of government indifference. Roberts, who came to the festival more than nine months pregnant, gave birth to a baby girl in Salt Lake City the day after her film's premiere.
On the world cinema side, James Marsh's riveting "Man on Wire" took both the jury prize and the audience award for world documentary. Treating French aerialist Philippe Petit's 1974 walk between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center like a daring bank robbery, this exhilarating film makes you shake your head in amazement. The extraordinarily single-minded Petit, who was in Park City for the premiere, insisted, not surprisingly, that "life should be lived on the edge of life."
Three other festival films won two awards each, starting with the rigorous "Ballast," the rare Sundance film also to be in competition in Berlin, which took the dramatic directing award for Lance Hammer and the cinematography award for Lol Crawley. Shot with nonprofessionals in the Mississippi Delta, "Ballast" is a deliberate, beautifully artistic film that deals with the effects of a suicide on three people with a complex emotional history.
Alex Rivera's "Sleep Dealer" won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for a film with science or technology as a theme. A visually exciting sci-fi epic with a strong sense of social commentary, "Sleep Dealer" created a fully realized world on a shoestring budget.
Director Rivera, who had terrific assistance from cinematographer Lisa Rinzler, said at the premiere that his crew went beyond teamwork into "collective delirium and insanity."
