The Sundance Film Festival announced the winners of their 2007 Jury and Audience prizes at the Closing Awards Ceremony in Park City, Utah.

The Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic, considered the top prize of the festival, went to Christopher Zalla's Padre Nuestro, while the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary went to Jason Kohn's Manda Bala (Send a Bullet). In the World Cinema categories, Jury Prizes went to Enemies of Happiness for documentary and Sweet Mud for dramatic.

The Audience Awards in the four categories went to:

Dramatic: James C. Strouse's Grace is Gone (previously reported as having won the Jury Prize and the first festival sale to The Weinstein Company)

Documentary: Irene Taylor Brodsky's Hear and Now

World Cinema Dramatic: John Carney's Once (I called this winner shortly after seeing the movie!)

World Cinema Documentary: David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon (Picked up for released by THINKFIlm a few days ago)

Directing Awards went to Sean and Andrea Nix Fine for War/Dance (doc) and Jeffrey Blitz for Rocket Science (dramatic), while Cinematography Awards went to Manda Bala (doc) and Joshua (dramatic), and the documentary Nanking received an award for Editing.

You can download a PDF listing all of the winners including the Special Jury Prizes by clicking here.

The Sundance Film Festival still has a few more days before it winds down, but I'm already back home in New York City, having seen a lot of great films, a number of good films and thankfully, only a couple really awful films. This being my first year at the festival, I have no idea how it compares to previous ones, but if this is the worst that the festival has to offer (as some of my grumpier colleagues seem to think), I'd love to be there during a good year, because it was everything I expected and more.

While I didn't get to see everything I wanted to see and missed a few of the movies that were making the news after being bought, I saw enough decent movies to come up with a list of my favorites, many of which have already been discussed on the Blog but deserve one more mention:

Now that I'm safely back in my New York apartment, which is a bit more cramped than my spacious Park City hotel room, it's time to reflect on my first visit to the Sundance Film Festival. This post isn't so much about the movies, which I hope have been well-covered in the rest of the blog, but about my own personal experiences and memories of my first time there.

The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop that Mike Cahill's dark comedy King of California has been picked up by First Look Pictures for just under $3 million after its screening at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie stars Michael Douglas as a man released from a mental institution who starts planning crazy schemes with his teen daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood.

The packed Sundance press and industry screening of Waitress wasn't too surprising considering the amount of attention the film has gotten due to the tragic murder of writer-director-actress Adrienne Shelly last November and the quick pick-up by Fox Searchlight over the weekend.

One probably can spend a lot of time dwelling on Shelly's murder when writing about her swan song or one can look past the negative and appreciate the fact that at least Shelly was able to complete her third and final film and that she'll achieve more fame and success post-morten by departing on a high point, which Waitress most certainly is.

The story centers around three waitresses who work at a smalltown Southern pie shop, in particular Jenna (Keri Russell), who has just learned she's pregnant from her abusive husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and that she's carrying baby of a man she doesn't love anymore. But before you take your violin out of its case, this is actually a comedy.

Three quirky new movies playing at this year's Sundance Film Festival have little in common, except that they're all very original, very different, and each of them is looking for distribution despite being hard to categorize or draw comparisons to other movies.

In that sense, The Ten may be the easiest of the trio to sell, being a straight comedy from David Wain and Ken Marino of "The State" and Wet Hot American Summer fame, while The Nines and Slipstream are two highly ambitious experimental films, the first from screenwriter John August and the second from actor Anthony Hopkins.

John August Interview

On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon dead outside the Dakota Hotel. Not much is known about Lennon's assailant, but Chapter 27, a new movie by Jarrett Schaefer starring Jaret Leto as Chapman, tries its best to get into the killer's head. A big deal had been made about the amount of weight the normally rail-thin Leto put-on to play the part, following in the method acting footsteps of De Niro's Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, but little else is known about the film, which is why many journalists and critics jumped on the early screening tonight at the Holiday Village. (The movie premieres at the festival on Thursday night at the Eccles.)

There was a full to capacity crowd at the Yarrow for the first press screening of Deborah Kempmeir's Hounddog or as it's affectionately become nicknamed, "The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie." It's been one of the most talked about movies playing at the festival since it was announced that it would be in competition, and as expected, there was a lot of morbid curiosity after right wing conservatives slammed the film as being child endangerment. In this coming-of-age tale, Fanning plays a young Southern girl from a broken family named Lewellen, who's obsessed with Elvis Presley. As much controversy that has surrounded the movie because of the much-hyped rape scene, that's not even remotely the worst offense of this tedious and overrated film.

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith are better known as British production duo Hammer and Tongs, who have created some of the country's most inventive and innovative music videos. A few years back, they took on Douglas Adams' The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, but for their second feature film, Son of Rambow, they take on a smaller story about two young school chums from different backgrounds, and in a mere 94 minutes, it has become my favorite movie of this year's Sundance Film Festival.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced the aquisition of even more movies at the Sundance Film Festival, including actor Justin Theroux's debut feature, Dedication, which went to The Weinstein Company in conjunction with First Look International for $4 million. (TWC will handle the domestic release.

Paramount Vantage has scooped up two movies themselves, making the biggest buy of the festival by paying $7 million for Garth Jennings' rites-of-passage comedy Son of Rambow (review coming soon!) and Ian Iqbal Rashid's Canadian drama How She Move, set in the world of a step-dancing competition. The latter was picked up for $3 to 4 million.

It has been announced that Fortissimo Films has bought the international rights to Nanking, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's documentary about the Japanese invasion of the Chinese capitol of Nanking at the start of WWII, which was in the documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

(Full press release at the link.)

It was announced today that Sony Pictures Classics has picked up world wide rights to the Sundance Documentary Competition film, "My Kid Could Paint That" from producer/director Amir Bar-Lev. Executive Produced by John Battsek, ("One Day In September") the film follows the story of the internationally renowned 4–year old artist Marla Olmstead, whose abstract paintings sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars before her father was accused of secretly having a hand in the work.

No one will be too surprised to see a film or two starring Steven Buscemi at the Sundance Film Festival, since he's been a mainstay in indie films that have played at the fest, including a few that he directed. What's odd about this year's Buscemi offerings, Delirious and Interview, is that they have many things in common, particularly the insightful way they look at the pretensions of the entertainment business. Delirious is the first film in five years from Tom DiCillo, reuniting the director with Buscemi after working together on his early films like Living in Oblivion and Box of Moonlight. Interview is Buscemi's fourth feature film as a director, a remake of the late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's film of the same name.

ComingSoon.net has learned that Fox Searchlight Pictures has picked up the late Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" for distribution. Shelly wrote, directed and starred in the film. She was discovered murdered in her Manhattan apartment in November of 2006.

I know that I've been a bit remiss in updating readers as planned with what's to come, but when you get home at 3 in the morning after seeing between 4 and 6 movies, believe me that posting to the Blog is often the last thing on one's mind. On top of that, there are a number of movies I've seen that I haven't had a chance to write about including Guillermo Arriaga's The Night Buffalo, David Wain's The Ten, two movies starring Steve Buscemi and a couple others. In order to keep readers updated, here's what I'll be seeing and working on over the next few days.

Sunday would be a quieter day for me with three press screenings at the Yarrow and the Holiday Village multiplex across the parking lot. George Ratliff's Joshua had been highly recommended to me by Greg Elwood of MSN Movies, or else there would have been no way I would have been up for an 8:30 AM screening on a Sunday morning. Andrew Currie's Fido is a movie I've wanted to see since I first heard about it back at the San Diego Comic-Con in '05, and it's been sitting on Lionsgate's shelf for far too long, for whatever reason. (The third movie of the day, Steve Buscemi's Interview, will be discussed in a separate piece.)

Despite my bad experience at the Eccles on Day 2, I was back on the horse for two very different jam-packed premieres on the eve of Sundance Day 3: Mike White's Year of the Dog and Rod Lurie's boxing drama Resurrecting the Champ.

Mike White is best known as the writer of comedies like Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, both which premiered at Sundance, plus his collaborations with Jack Black, School of Rock and Nacho Libre. Rod Lurie is the director of movies like The Contender and The Last Castle and executive producer of TV shows like "Line of Fire" and "Commander in Chief," and Resurrecting the Champ is his first feature film in five years. Their two movies couldn't be any more different.

I really must be some kind of crazy jinx, because so far, the only two movies that have been picked up for distribution are the ones that I didn't get a chance to see. (Although I do have to say that I've seen some decent films that yet to have distribution.)

Crazy Love, the new doc by Dan Klores, whose name is still on a prestigious New York publicity company, sold to Magnolia Films late last week, while The Weinstein Company has paid $4 million for the rights to Grace is Gone, James Strouse's drama which stars John Cusack as a widower who lost his wife in the Iraq War, but decides to take his two daughters to Florida instead of telling them.

Variety broke both stories:

Crazy Love Aquisition News

Grace is Gone Aquisition News

At least the latter I hoped to catch at the festival but wasn't able to squeeze it in last night. I'll have to see if there's a chance of catching a public screening, though it's less likely now that the news has broken, since many more people will make an effort to see it at the festival now that it's been deemed salesworthy.

UPDATE: And the L.A. Times has broken the news that The Weinstein Company and Lionsgate have teamed up on the purchase of Mitchell Lichenstein's Teeth (see my review below):

Teeth Aquisition

I'm not surprised by Lionsgate jumping on this one, but I'm curious why they felt the need to partner with the Weinsteins, since they would have done fine on their own. (I still wonder how they're going to get some of the stuff in the movie past an R-rating, since it's pretty graphic.)

Sundance audiences are supposed to be the most receptive moviegoers in the world, so on Day 2, I decided to spend a bit of time with the punters at three back-to-back premieres. The premiere of Sundance Lab alum Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, was wisely held at the festival's largest venue, the Eccles Theatre, a ginormous high school auditorium which holds over 1,200 people.

Although I've seen three or four movies since my last post yesterday, I wanted to jump ahead and talk about one of the movies that's probably getting the most buzz at the festival, if the packed Yarrow Theatre press/industry screening was any testament. A lot of people have been intrigued by the horrifying premise of Austin filmmaker Mitchell Lichtenstein's debut Teeth, which involves a teen girl who has teeth inside her privates that don't like intruders.

The first half of what's going to end up being a very long day began with three press screenings, two of the movies competing in the world dramatic competition and a new movie by Japan's living legends of animation.

I mentioned the documentary War/Dance briefly in the "What I've Seen" section, but I wanted to elaborate a bit more, since I'm really in love with everything about this movie. It's not just its story of how three teens from war-torn Northern Uganda who've suffered all sorts of tragedies are able to find happiness, but also because of the gorgeous way that co-director Sean Fine filmed it.

Friday is when things will start to get crazy after a relatively tame day to figure out what's going on and where everything is (and just barely, in my case). I have a lot of choices to make in terms of what to see, and a lot will depend on which public screenings I can get tickets to. I have no idea how much time I'll have to post about any of the movies I see either.

The day will probably start off early with Once, Jon Carney's Irish musical, and then either it'll be Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (check out the "What to See" post for more on this and the other movies) or The Legacy from Géla and Temur Babluani. Will give Otomo's Bugmaster a look after that and might then be able take a couple hours off. Maybe I'll eat something.

I'm hoping to see Jeffrey Blitz's Rocket Science in the evening, but if for some reason, I'm able to get tickets to the premiere of The Savages, it might make more sense to do that, if only to catch the Q 'n' A. Even more important is the midnight screening of David Wain's The Ten, which I'd like to see before interviewing him next week, and if there's time (and I get a ticket), in between, then it will be Guillermo Arriaga's The Night Buffalo, starring Diego Luna.

Should be a full day with anywhere between 5 and 6 screenings...wish me luck!

If there's one thing this year's Sundance Film Festival will achieve is that it's going to set the documentary genre on its ear. It definitely seems like the filmmakers behind Nanking and War/Dance were trying a few innovative ideas, but it can't be clearer than with Brett Morgen's third film and the festival opener, Chicago 10. There was a lot of excitement in the makeshift screening room set-up at the Yarrow Hotel for the first of three press screenings of the film, as attending critics and journalists prepared for what would be the first of many movies over the next week.

Since this was my first time at Park City's annual film festival, it seemed that a good way to get acclimated would be to attend the opening day press conference downtown at the Egyptian Theatre. (Incidentally, the locals call it "uptown" even though it's all the way South, but after a brisk walk, mostly uphill, I figured out why.) I arrived at the already packed Egyptian for the press conference with Sundance founder Robert Redford, program director Geoffrey Gilmore, and Brett Morgen, whose film Chicago 10 would kick off the festival later that night.

Every year at Sundance, there are movies that people have been talking about long before anyone has had a chance to see them. This year's festival is no exception, as there are a few movies that have had tongues wagging as soon as their existence became known, either because they feature well-known stars or returning Sundance faves, some of them taking on different roles (as is the case with Mike White, Chris Smith, David Gordon Green and others.) Then of course, there are the movies that I really want to see, a category that isn't always the same as the movies that have the most buzz.

The 2007 Sundance Film Festival announced today the members of the six juries awarding prizes at Festival, which runs January 18-28, 2007 in Park City, Sundance Resort, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, Utah. The juries are made up of twenty-four individuals selected from the global film community, each of whom are bringing a broad range of experience and a unique perspective on film. The award-winners will be announced on the evening of January 27 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony at the Park City Racquet Club.

The Sundance Film Festival hasn't even started, but I've already caught a few movies, which certainly will help lighten the load once I get out there:

Hello, everyone!

This is Edward Douglas; some of you might know me as The Weekend Warrior. I'll be ComingSoon.net's roving reporter at this year's Sundance Film Festival in scenic Park City, Utah. I'm pretty excited at the chance to attend the festival for the first time, because I've been following it on TV and the 'net for years, and I've always been thrilled when I had the chance to catch the movies that played when they finally got around to screening here in New York.