‘A Thousand And One,’ ‘Going To Mars’ Win Sundance Grand Jury Awards

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival handed out bushels of awards on Friday for acting, directing and writing on dozens of features, shorts and episodic programs in its various sections. The big winner was A Thousand and One’s A.V. Rockwell, whose film won the grand jury prize for the U.S. dramatic section. The movie follows a woman who kidnaps her six-year-old son from foster care, and heads home to New York City.

The grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries went to Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, about the prominent poet. It was directed by Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson. The section’s directing award went to A Still Small Voice’s Luke Lorentzen.

The Persian Version, a drama set in a large Iranian-American family, won the audience award for the U.S. dramatic section, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Maryam Keshavarz. Theater Camp, a mock documentary about summer musical drama camp nerds starring Ben Platt, won a special jury award for its ensemble.

Magazine Dreams, with a breakout performance by Jonathan Majors about an amateur body builder, won a special jury prize for its creative vision. Lio Mihiel won a special jury prize for acting in Mutt, while Sing J. Lee won the directing award in the section for The Accidental Getaway Driver, based on a true story about a Southern California driver who gets carjacked during a robbery.

The Eternal Memory, about a man suffering from Alzheimer’s, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentaries, while Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’s Anna Hints won the section’s directing award.

Scrapper, directed by Charlotte Regan, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic section. Slow’s Marija Kavtaradze won the section’s directing award. Shayda won the audience award in the section. Radical, directed by Christopher Zalla, won a Festival Favorite Award.

Among the other numerous awards handed out for various of the festival’s many sections are:

• Animalia’s Sofia Alaoui won a special jury award for creative vision in the world dramatic section. Cinematographer Lilis Soares won a special jury award for her work in the same section for the striking visuals in Mami Wata, while Rosa Marchant received a special jury award for her performance in When It Melts.

• Beyond Utopia won the Audience Award for a U.S. documentary, while 20 Days in Mariupol won the audience award for the world documentary section.
• Kokomo City, about four Black trans sex workers, won both the Audience Award in the NEXT section and a NEXT Innovator Award as well.
• Fantastic Machine, an intriguing documentary out of Oscar nominee Ruben Ostlund’s (Triangle of Sadness) Swedish film collective, details the increasingly complicated relationship between humans and the moving image in an era of omnipresent social media, deep fakes and increasingly capable artificial intelligence. It won a Special Jury Award: Creative Vision in the World Cinema Documentary section. Directors Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson collected clips, memes and other video from nearly 200 years of still and moving images to pull together a project arguing in favor of far better media literacy in a more complex era of content consumption. Against the Tide also won a World Cinema documentary special jury award for Verite Filmmaking.

• Daniela I. Quiroz won the Oppenheim editing award for her work on the U.S. documentary Going Varsity in Mariachi, about a competitive high school dancing team in Texas.
• The Stroll won a special jury award for U.S. documentaries, for its “clarity of vision,” about transgender sex workers and the history of New York City’s Meatpacking District. Bad Press, about a conflict over First Amendment issues on a Native American reservation, won a special jury award for “freedom of expression.”
• The Pod Generation, which was previously announced as winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which spotlights a film focused on science or technology. The sci-fi story centers around a big tech company whose detachable artificial wombs allow couples to share their pregnancies.

This year’s festival, which kicked off Jan. 19, was the first in-person gathering in three years, since shortly before the pandemic locked down the film business and much of the rest of the world.

After two years of virtual festing, this year’s edition under new Executive Director Eugene Hernandez was a hybrid affair. It attracted plenty of in-person attendance, particularly over the first long weekend of premieres, parties and brand activations.

But for those inclined to dodge Covid concerns or the sometimes-grueling realities of navigating a far-flung festival at high altitude, amid heavy snow drifts, terrible traffic and single-degree temperatures, the virtual version offered access to films and many of the panels and conversations sponsored by Sundance itself.

This year’s festival also was a chance for an in-person bow by the cast and crew of CODA, which won the top prize in the virtual 2021 festival before selling to Apple TV+ for a record $25 million and going on to win the Oscars last year for best picture and two other categories.

Because of the pandemic, the cast and crew never got a chance to bask in the festival adulation, press coverage and awards ceremony that traditionally accompany Sundance’s biggest winners.

CODA was one of several past winners to get a reprise screening at this year’s Sundance, including the music documentary Summer of Soul, which also was a big winner at the 2021 festival before snagging last year’s Oscar’s for best documentary feature.