Tonight they handed out the trophies at Sundance: Unprepossessing plexiglass widgets that nevertheless carry a lot of weight. As expected, major awards were won by ?Trouble the Water,? (Grand Jury Prize for Documentary), "American Teen" (Best Directing: Documentary), and "Ballast" (both Directing: Dramatic and Excellence in Cinematography). Flying in under the radar was Courtney Hunt?s ?Frozen River,? about a desperately poor single mom (Melissa Leo) and a Mohawk girl (Misty Upham) who smuggle immigrants from Canada; it won the grand jury prize for dramatic film but until halfway through Quentin Tarantino's announcement of the award (see below), most people in the audience thought he was talking about "Ballast."

?Sleep Dealer,? a cyberpunk drama set in the near-future, won both the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan for outstanding film focusing on science or technology. The audience award for documentary, voted on by festivalgoers, was ?Fields of Fuel,? about the alternative-fuels movement, while ?The Wackness? won the audience award for drama for its baroque comic look at a high school drug dealer (Josh Peck, of Nickelodeon?s ?Drake and Josh?) and his pothead therapist (Ben Kingsley).

One of my festival favorites won two awards in the world cinema categories. ?Man on Wire,? a poetic essay about tightrope walker Philippe Petit?s 1974 crossing of the World Trade Center towers, won both the audience award and the grand jury prize for documentaries. The Swedish coming-of-age drama ?King of Ping Pong? won the grand jury prize for drama as well as a cinematography prize, while ?Captain Abu Raed,? the first feature film to be made in Jordan in 50 years, won the world cinema audience award for drama. The full list of winners is at the Sundance site.

The Sundance awards aren?t a high-profile glamour sweepstakes like the Oscars or the Golden Globes. Actually, they?re more important: a crucial vote of approval to the filmmakers who need it most, those toiling in the fields of low-budget, independent fiction films and documentaries. Or as ?Ballast? cinematographer Lol Crawley said as he regarded his trophy with stunned bemusement, ?Well, this is going to help.?

Okay, now for some video, and time to put the kids to bed, 'cause some of this stuff is what your grandma would call salty. The awards ceremony was emceed by William H. Macy, who got well and truly risque in an opening riff that managed to tie half the titles of movies playing in the festival with an anecdote about hotel self-pleasure. And his wife was in the audience! Not all of it worked but points for trying, and more points for carrying off the ridiculous western outfit with aplomb.

Here's gentle giant Lance Hammer saying thanks to the jury for voting him best director in the U.S. dramatic category.

Here's "Trouble the Water" directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal tearing up while accepting the grand jury prize for U.S. documentary.

Cover junior's ears again: Quentin Tarantino hands out the grand jury prize for U.S. dramatic film with what's for him a reasonably sedate monologue.

"Frozen River" director and grand jury prize winner Courtney Hunt accepts her award.

I go home, go sleep now.

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I was on a shuttle bus at Sundance when my wife text messaged me the news about Heath Ledger. By the time I made it off the bus, everyone was buzzing -- his death had hit the fest like a virus. It didn't take much time, and only a few hours later I started seeing stories from people wondering whether Ledger's death had anything to do with the amount of work he put into the role of Joker in this summer's The Dark Knight. When the New York Times interviewed him last month, Ledger admitted to locking himself in a hotel room for a month to get into character, then downing sleeping pills afterward to catch up on some much-needed rest. Though we're not entirely sure yet, it was most likely a combination of sleeping pills and other medication that did him in.

Warner Bros. has already toned down their aggressive Dark Knight marketing plan, turning the movie's official website into a make-shift shrine dedicated to the actor. So if it was this role that ultimately sent Ledger off in an unhealthy direction, why did he take it on in the first place. ComicMix currently has up an exclusive audio interview with Ledger, conducted last month, in which the actor explains why, exactly, he decided to take on the part. According to the actor, he had no interest in re-creating what Nicholson had so expertly displayed earlier, and that if Burton was directing this film he probably wouldn't have done it. But when Christopher Nolan asked Ledger to play Joker, he watched Batman Begins, saw a different angle he could take and jumped right in. You can check out the interview over here.

Personally, I think it's a cop out to blame a role in a movie for a person's death. Obviously actors and actresses take on all kinds of roles in any given year -- some of which are a lot more demanding than the Joker -- and they come away just fine. What it boils down to is the kind of person you are; how much pressure you put on yourself and what you do to alleviate that pressure. Our thoughts and prayers are with his friends and family this weekend as they say goodbye to a man so many people loved dearly.

Friday started with You, The Living by the director of the hilarious Swedish Songs from the Second Floor, Roy Andersson. Second was the critically acclaimed pregnancy drama/comedy Juno, starring Ellen Page and Jennifer Garner, that is destined to become the favorite for the KPN audience award that is presented on Friday February 1. This rather modest day (due to some changes in my program) ended with the much anticipated but disappointing Thai horror flick The Unseeable. (more…)

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Wesley has already written about the mesmerizing Hurricane Katrina documentary "Trouble the Water," but having caught up with this festival favorite this afternoon, I'm finding it hard to dismiss. One thing struck me right off: Since "Trouble" avails itself so heavily of the amateur video-camera footage of 9th Ward resident Kimberly Rivers, the movie functions as a real-life "Cloverfield" -- a monster-movie where the monster is weather. Which makes George W. Bush, FEMA head Mike Brown, and a soulless post-hurricane bureaucracy the equivalent of those arachnoid mini-monsters that jump on people and rip their hearts out.

"Trouble the Water" also makes the rather startling claim that disaster can make you a better person. Rivers' husband, Scott, allows as how he was just another drugged-up neighborhood loser and probably would have ended up "in jail or underground" if the hurricane hadn't forced him to forge bonds with the people around him (including a local rival and now close friend). By the end of the movie he's seen doing construction work with a boss who's clearly a mentor; Kimberly, too, has a bigger, richer sense of herself for her heroic behavior during an unimaginable time. Amidst all the damage it wrought, who knew Katrina could also blast a person's horizons open?

I also finally saw "Ballast," an unnaturally quiet drama set in the Mississippi Delta region that has some of the most respectful word of mouth in the entire festival. For good reason: Lance Hammer's mysterious tale of three survivors of a fourth man's suicide is an astonishingly controlled piece of filmmaking, with shots that evoke classic landscape photography and performances that are so real as to seem invisible. The movie has a slow arc toward redemption but nothing in it seems forced or remotely Hollywood; everything's rooted in the low skies and endless spaces of the setting. Daringly, Hammer doesn't use a musical score of any sort, and the silence is both oppressive and ultimately liberating. Here's some video of the director explaining why he decided to dispense with music.

The Patti Smith documentary, "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," was ten years in the making and had a lot of input from the singer, so it's not terribly surprising that the final result plays a lot like a Patti Smith song: oblique, impassioned, dancing on the edge of mindboggling pretentiousness, and often exhilirating. I'm a fan so I quite liked it, but I can't say the same for the two older women next to me, who sighed heavily as this impressionistic journey -- as far from the standard talking-head bio-doc as you can get -- rolled toward the two-hour mark.

"Secrecy," from Harvard film-prof godhead Robb Moss and Harvard science-history brainiac Peter Galison, attracted a very particular crowd: articulate, knowledgable, and borderline paranoid. The film's a balanced polemic (no, that's not a paradox) about our government's rapidly growing fetish for hiding information from its citizens; you can actually feel the movie focusing your understanding of the issues as you watch. The post-film discussion was heady and occasionally emotional; here's some video of Moss explaining why the Valerie Plame scandal was not included in the mix.

Overall, my early Sundance gloom -- see yesterday's Globe article -- has dispelled, as I've seen some very good movies and people seem excited about them for the right reasons. Or, as Robb Moss said to me after the "Secrecy" screening, "When you?re at Sundance it seems like it?s the whole world, and the metric of the whole world is whether you sell something. But most things don?t sell, and really what Sundance is fantastic about is putting your film in play." With the onus of the Big Buy mostly gone from the picture, audiences seem more than happy to play.

Here's a video of "Baghead" director Mark Duplass describing the filmmaking methods he and his brother Jay employ when making one of their studiously offhanded low-fi movies. What's interesting is that the new film is more tightly structured than previous work like "The Puffy Chair" -- mercy, it even has a plot -- and that the loosy-goosey approach outlined here definitely shows signs of strain. You try letting four equally important characters improvise while deciding which one to train the camera on.