‘Sunday’ Wins Top Prize for Drama at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah — Reacting perhaps against the relentlessly juvenile sensibility and subject matter of most of the films in competition, the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night gave its Grand Jury Prize for drama and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award to “Sunday,” the only film on display to deal unapologetically with the concerns of middle age.

Directed by Jonathan Nossiter (who co-wrote the script with James Lasdun) in an enigmatic, art-film style, the surprise winner is a story of misunderstanding, hope and despair set in the bleak far reaches of Queens. A frustrated, struggling British actress (Lisa Harrow) mistakes a destitute resident of a homeless shelter (David Suchet) for a celebrated film director. The story of that day unfolds in a way that is delicate, deliberate and emotionally telling.

With Robert Redford trapped at home because of an avalanche, the Saturday night crowd at the Park City Racquet Club screamed like fans at a high school basketball game for most of the awards, which were so numerous that they seemed to be going to every film in the festival. Equally exuberant was director Nossiter, who hugged so many people that he finally said, “Don’t worry, this is not going to be group sex.”

Another multiple winner on the dramatic side was “Hurricane,” which took all or part of three awards, including the festival’s first-ever directing nod, to young writer-director Morgan J. Freeman who said, “It’s an amazing moment, I’m totally freaking out. I’m going to sit back down.”

An exercise in urban melodrama, “Hurricane” benefits greatly from Brendan Sexton’s intense performance as a basically decent 15-year-old dealing with the dreams and disappointments of coming of age in a larcenous environment. The film won the cinematography award for Enrique Chediak and split the audience award with a very different kind of urban undertaking, “Love Jones,” a glossy and romantic treatment of love among a group of African Americans described in the press notes as “over-educated and underemployed.”

An even bigger surprise was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary, the derivative “Girls Like Us,” a 56-minute film by directors Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio that follows in the footsteps of Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” by tracing four years in the lives of four teenagers from South Philadelphia.

Taking the audience award in documentary was the thoughtful and moving “Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End,” written and directed by Monte Bramer. An examination of the life of the gay writer and activist who won the National Book Award for “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story” before dying of AIDS in 1995, “Paul Monette” speaks to the strength of love and the power of one man’s determination to know himself and to make that knowledge relevant to the world. Bramer thanked Monette for his cooperation, adding emotionally: “I hope with all my heart that you are somewhere and can see this.”

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The only documentary to win two awards was Arthur Dong’s chilling “Licensed to Kill,” a powerful investigation centering on interviews with an unnervingly candid group of convicted murderers of homosexuals. The film examines the causes of the hostility that led these men to attack and kill.

“Licensed to Kill” took the directing award on the documentary side as well as the Filmmaker’s Trophy, voted by the directors of the competition. When director Dong came up a second time, he joked that he would’ve brought a change of clothes if he’d known, and settled for giving the crowd a brief look at his T-shirt, which said “DYKE” in large capital letters.

The Filmmaker’s Trophy in the dramatic competition went to the accomplished if perverse “In the Company of Men,” which focuses on a different kind of fury, that of unrepentant misogynists toward women. Writer-director Neil LaBute took his own picture with a disposable camera (“If I don’t do this, no one will,” he said with a smile), then thanked his wife because, “if one doesn’t thank one’s wife, and remembers it somewhere over Denver, it’s a long trip home.”

The documentary jury recognized four other films. Kirby Dick’s self-explanatory “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist” received a special jury prize; the cinematography award went to Renee Tajima-Pena’s peppy Asian American road movie, “My America . . . or Honk if You Love Buddha.”

The Freedom of Expression award was split between two personal documentaries, “FamilyName,” an investigation by Macky Alston into the racial implications of his last name, and teacher Laura Angelica Simon’s “Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary,” which illustrates the pernicious effects of Proposition 187 on the children at a school in Los Angeles. Producer Tracey Trench took a photograph of the crowd, explaining that “Laura promised her second grade class that she’d take a picture of the audience. So everyone smile!”

The dramatic jury handed out a pair of special prizes. For the first time, a special jury award for production design was given, to Therese DePrez for her work on Mark Pellington’s version of the Dan Wakefield novel “Going All the Way.”

And a popular acting award went to Parker Posey, perennially a major presence at the festival, for her portrayal of the Kennedy-obsessed Jackie O in “The House of Yes.” “I’ve never gotten an award, I’ve never even been at a podium,” the actress said. “This is wild.”

As always at Sundance, there was some surprise that certain films were neglected. Among the dramatic choices, Bart Freundlich’s thoughtful “The Myth of Fingerprints” came up empty, possibly because it was too conventional for the jury. On the documentary side, Mark Jonathan Harris’ “The Long Way Home” may have been penalized for similar reasons: Rumors were strong that the documentary jury felt the movie neglected the Palestinian side of things.

Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “The Long Way Home” illuminates an ignored corner of history, what happened to “the surviving remnant” (the Jews who outlasted the Nazi concentration camps) in the time between the end of World War II in 1945 and the creation of Israel in 1948. Deftly mixing rarely seen newsreel footage, the letters and diaries of survivors and present-day testimony, “The Long Way Home” is old-fashioned historical documentary making, at its most moving and accomplished.

Though they don’t tend to create much buzz, Sundance does give awards in two other categories. This year the special recognition in Latin American cinema went to “Landscapes of Memory” from Brazil, directed by Jose Araujo, and an honorable mention went to veteran Mexican director Arturo Ripstein for his “Deep Crimson.” The winner of special recognition in short filmmaking was “Man About Town,” directed by Kris Isaacson and Matt Gunn; honorable mention went to Richard C. Zimmerman’s wacky computer-animated “Birdhouse” and KC Amos’ “Syphon-Gun.”