The best from Sundance: big winners, films and future stars to watch
Nate Parker's slave rebellion film The Birth of a Nation takes top prizes at the festival of independent film, Kenneth Lonergan delivers his moving third feature, and a 13-year-old New Zealander with comic timing is a name to watch out for
Given the rousing Sundance premiere of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, the story of an 1831 slave rebellion that has been likened to 2013 Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave, it was a foregone conclusion that the film would emerge the big winner in Park City, Utah. Indeed it did, taking out both the grand jury prize and the audience award, as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Whiplash and Fruitvale Station had done in previous years.
Advertisement
Armie Hammer, Nate Parker and Jayson Warner Smith in The Birth of a Nation.
The big shock of the night was that Swiss Army Man, a repetitive mess of a film starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse, took out the directing award in the US dramatic section for Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
A still of Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano in Swiss Army Man. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won the best director prize at Sundance for the film.
Antonio Campos was more deserving of the best director prize for Christine, starring Rebecca Hall as a bipolar American news anchor who shot herself on live television in 1974.
Many of the contenders that missed out were far better, such as Antonio Campos’ Christine, starring Rebecca Hall in her strongest role to date as Christine Chubbuck, the 29 year-old bipolar American news anchor who shot herself on live television in 1974; and Tallulah, the film directing debut of Sian Heder (Orange Is the New Black) which marks a Juno reunion of sorts, with Ellen Page as a young drifter who kidnaps a baby girl from her incompetent mother and goes to live with Allison Janney’s jilted wife.
Joe Seo in Spa Night, in which he plays a closeted gay Korean-American teenager.
A special jury award for breakthrough performance went to Joe Seo for Spa Night, about a closeted gay Korean-American teenager who follows his desires and finds more than he bargains for at a Korean spa in the Koreatown of Los Angeles. Seo, who was no longer in town to accept his award, said generously on Twitter that the film’s openly gay American-born director Andrew Ahn is “one of the 13 Hot Directors to Watch according to The Wrap!!! Bring it on!”
Also competing in the US dramatic competition was the quietly compelling Lovesong, directed by the Korean-born American So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain, For Ellen). It tells the story of two women, played by Riley Keough and Jena Malone, as they embark on a road trip but struggle to express their feelings for one another.
Advertisement
A still from Yao Huang's Pleasure. Love.
First-time Chinese director Yao Huang’s romantic drama Pleasure. Love. was entered in the world dramatic competition. The film unfolds in two sections. The first features charismatic newcomer Ying Daizhen as a penniless writer who falls for a beautiful older businesswoman (Yu Nan); the second part is a kind of reversal of the story, with an older businessman (Guo Xiaodong) meeting a young girl (Ying again) at the same Beijing dance hall. It’s all a bit confusing – though the film looks fabulous.
