Sundance film festival hands prizes to 'dark and grim' films

Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Surrogate and The House I Live In among challenging award-winners at 2012 festival

• Ben Child
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012 13.30 GMT

Robert Redford described the tone of this year's Sundance festival as 'dark and grim'. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

A Louisiana-set drama about a father and his daughter threatened by the impact of global warming, the autobiographical tale of a man's quest to lose his virginity despite living out much of his life in an iron lung and a polemical documentary targeting America's war on drugs were among the top prize-winners as the Sundance film festival reached its denouement at the weekend.

1. Beasts of the Southern Wild
2. Production year: 2012
3. Country: USA
4. Directors: Behn Zeitlin
5. Cast: Dwight Henry, Quvenzhané Wallis
6. More on this film

Beasts of the Southern Wild, the story of a six-year-old girl living with her dad in the flood-threatened basins near the Mississippi delta, won both the jury prize for best US drama and a cinematography prize. Benh Zeitlin's film features a cast of non-actors and has been praised by the Guardian's Damon Wise as "the first significant eco-threat movie to be seen through the eyes of the generation that has inherited global warming".

The Surrogate, which is based on the autobiographical writings of journalist and poet Mark O'Brien, won the US drama audience award and a special jury prize for the acting of its cast. The film, which details the efforts of a 38-year-old semi-paralysed polio victim (Martha Marcy May Marlene's John Hawkes), to embark on a sexual awakening via a "sex surrogate" played by the Oscar-winning actor Helen Hunt, has already picked up one of the festival's most lucrative distribution deals in the form of a $6m sale to studio Fox Searchlight. Jeremy Kay called it "an unexpected crowd-pleaser" with a "mesmerising" performance from Hawkes and tipped the latter for Oscars glory in 2013.

The House I Live In, which documents the failure and the fallout for impoverished areas of America's war on drugs, won the documentary grand jury prize. Speaking at Saturday's awards ceremony, director Eugene Jarecki labelled authorities' battle against the drug trade "tragically immoral and so heartbreakingly wrong and misguided". Citing the large number of unfair drug penalties affecting minorities, as well as the country's high prison population, he said the war was "a terrible scar on America". The US documentary audience award went to another controversial piece, Kirby Dick's The Invisible War, which exposes the high number of instances of rape and sexual assault in the US military. Both films reflected the "dark and grim" tone of this year's Sundance, described by founder Robert Redford, who had warned during the festival's launch that this year's crop of movies mirrored current US travails. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Alison Klayman's film about the renowned Chinese artist and activist's increasingly public clashes with the Chinese government, won the US documentary special jury prize.

Outside the competition, there was British success for Oscar-winning UK film-maker James Marsh, whose film Shadow Dancer was well-received. It tells the story of an Irish mother from an IRA-supporting family who is encouraged to become an informant by MI5. Starring Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough, it was described by Wise as a "film that will surprise those who know Marsh only from his docs – the Oscar-winning Man on Wire and Bafta-nominated Project Nim – and also cement the director's reputation as one of the UK's leading auteurs".

Sundance, which was founded as the Utah/US film festival in Salt Lake City in August 1978 and took on its present moniker in 1991 following several years of Redford's involvement and sponsorship, has become known as the premier US event for independent film-making. Recent years have seen films such as An Education, Precious and Little Miss Sunshine, all of which screened at the festival, go on to win major awards.

Full list of Sundance winners

Grand jury prize, documentary: The House I Live In

Grand jury prize, drama: Beasts of the Southern Wild

US directing award: The Queen of Versailles, Lauren Greenfield

US directing award: Middle of Nowhere, Ava Duvernay

Waldo Salt screenwriting award: Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow

Audience award, US documentary: The Invisible War

Audience award, US dramatic: The Surrogate

Special jury prizes, US documentary: Love Free or Die and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

US dramatic special jury prize for producing: Jonathan Schwartz and Andrea Sperling, Smashed and Nobody Walks

US dramatic special jury prize for Ensemble Acting: The Surrogate

Shorts audience award: The Debutante Hunters

Excellence in cinematography, US documentary: Chasing Ice

Excellence in cinematography, US dramatic: Beasts of the Southern Wild

US documentary editing award: Detropia

Best of next award: Sleepwalk With Me

Alfred P Sloan feature film prize: Robot and Frank and Valley of Saints

World cinema jury special prize, Documentary: Searching for Sugar Man

World cinema documentary editing: Indie Game: The Movie, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky

World cinema jury prize,documentary: The Law in These Parts, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, director

World cinema dramatic special jury prize: Can, Rasit Celikezer, director

World cinema cinematography award, drama: David Raedeker, My Brother the Devil

World cinema cinematography award, documentary: Lars Skree, Putin's Kiss

World cinema directing award, documentary: Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 5 Broken Cameras

Shorts audience award: The Debutante Hunters, Maria White, director

World cinema audience award: Searching for Sugar Man

Visions of Ecstasy cleared for release after 23 years

Short film banned for 'blasphemous libel' since 1989 finally gets classification from BBFC

• Andrew Pulver
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 January 2012 17.38 GMT

Visions of Ecstasy features a scene where St Teresa of Avila caresses Christ's body on the cross. 

The controversial short film Visions of Ecstasy has been given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Certification (BBFC), after being denied one for 23 years and becoming the only film banned in Britain for "blasphemous libel".

Visions of Ecstasy contains a scene, as the BBFC describes it, "in which a figure representing St Teresa of Avila interacts sexually with a figure representing the crucified Christ". This was enough for it to fall foul of the Video Recordings Act 1984 (designed to take "video nasties" out of the market place), and the film, directed by Nigel Wingrove, subsequently became a cause celebre for censorship campaigners, but ended in failure at the European Court of Human Rights in 1996.

However, the BBFC remained inflexible until 2008, when the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act abolished the blasphemy and blasphemous libel offences. Wingrove was invited to resubmit his film. He told the Guardian at the time: "I was gobsmacked by the reaction. I can see why some people might have been offended, but it was pretty mild stuff really."

Wingrove told AP that the furore had destroyed his aspirations as a film-maker: "It was my second self-financing film and had it not been banned I would have continued to make films, but that all got knocked sideways and had a huge impact on my career."

Wingrove subsequently set up the video distribution label Redemption Films, which specialises in occult and fetish horror.

2012 in the arts: will it be a cultural triumph or a gloriously British disaster?

While 2011 was all about cuts, the arts community puts its best foot forward in 2012 as the Olympics come to London

 

People will be waiting to see if director Danny Boyle's Olympic £80m opening ceremony beats Beijing's 2008 display. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

The arrival of the Olympics in London will mean that British culture is on show like never before. Commentators will be poring over what these headline events say about us as nation, whether they were planned to tie in with the Games or not.

The Olympics opening ceremony

Directed by Danny Boyle, in November this extravaganza had its budget doubled to more than £80m – either an encouraging sign or an extremely bad one. It was thought impossible to top Beijing's opening ceremony, but the ballooning costs have raised the stakes vertiginously. Could either be a triumph, or that most British of things – a glorious disaster.

Indie's past comes back to haunt it

It's a landmark year for three indie institutions. In April, NME is 60. Three months later, the music weekly is scheduled to meet with Morrissey in the high court over claims that a 2007 interview smeared him as a racist. Light relief will be provided by the almost simultaneous reappearance of some other Mancunian music heroes, the Stone Roses – their gigs will be the pop events of the summer, especially in the absence of Glastonbury.

A big year for Britart

This year involves major shows from the UK's most famous artists. David Hockney kicks things off in January with a selection of massive landscape paintings at the Royal Academy in London and around Yorkshire, his home county. Tate Modern's Damien Hirst retrospective will feature his most talked-about work, from the shark to the diamond skull. Elsewhere, exhibitions of work by Lucien Freud, Jeremy Deller and JMW Turner will stake a claim for Britain's mastery at the installation and easel – or at least our enduring flair for subversion and self-mockery.

Shakespeare in the streets and cinemas

Hammering home the point that Britain is the home of the Bard, this year will showcase almost everything he ever wrote staged at the UK-wide World Shakespeare Festival. There will be Shakespeare in the nation's living rooms, too, with Sam Mendes overseeing big-budget productions of the plays for the BBC. The hottest ticket will be Mark Rylance's return to London's Globe theatre in Twelfth Night and Richard III. He and 50 other actors also promise to ambush unsuspecting passers-by with bursts of Shakespeare on the street or tube, which should confuse a few tourists – and indeed natives. Coincidentally, Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus also hits cinemas in January.

Smoke and bells

Two Cultural Olympiad projects should reaffirm the UK's reputation for eccentricity. At 8am on 27 July, the first day of the Olympics, artist Martin Creed hopes the whole country will sound doorbells, church bells and wind chimes for his self-explanatory Work No 1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung As Quickly and As Loudly As Possible for Three Minutes. It's already been denounced by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, who believe that 8am is "not the right time for bell ringing". Over on Merseyside, a plume of mist will rise from Wirral Waters, created by New York-based artist Anthony McCall and visible from 60 miles away.

Classical music, cultural exchange

At the Proms in July, Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will perform all nine of Beethoven's symphonies, starting on the first day of the Games.
Covent Garden stages Wagner's Ring Cycle in September for the first time in three years. However, the performance with most lasting impact is set to be in Scotland. Since 2008, children in the deprived estate Raploch in Stirling have received intensive tuition in a classical music education programme based on the famous Venezuelan El Sistema.
In June, El Sistema's conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, will spend four days working in Raploch with their orchestra Big Noise, culminating in an unmissable performance at Stirling Castle.

Paramount beats Warner Bros to studio box office crown

Paramount is top studio with a worldwide total of $5bn in 2011, boosted by its Transformers and Paranormal Activity franchises

 

Power house ... Transformers: Dark of the Moon helped Paramount pip Warner Bros to the top studio spot in 2011

Paramount has beaten Warner Bros for the crown of the world's most successful studio following a year in which franchises such as Transformers, Mission: Impossible and Paranormal Activity ruled the box office.


Warner had been the top studio for the past three years, but Paramount managed a worldwide total of $5.17bn (£3.32bn) in 2011 to take the No 1 spot. Its major films included Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which took $1.123bn worldwide, Kung Fu Panda 2 with $665.7m and Paranormal Activity 3 with $203m on a budget of just $5m. Warner, which released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 and The Hangover part 2 last year, was close behind with $4.67bn.

"This achievement reflects the combined efforts of our entire team across the globe and the careful process by which we select the projects and partners we believe in," said Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey. "We produce pictures that aspire to entertain audiences around the world, while at the same time we have sought to find innovative ways to reach moviegoers in this changing entertainment environment." The studio will release Brad Pitt zombie flick World War Z, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest The Dictator, toy franchise sequel GI Joe: Retaliation and a fourth Paranormal Activity film in 2012.

Paramount's apparently impressive feat must be seen in the context of its current role as distributor for smaller operations such as Dreamworks Animation, which produced Kung Fu Panda 2, and Marvel Studios, which released box office hits such as Thor and Captain America in 2011. The Dreamworks deal runs only until the end of next year, though Paramount has already launched its own animation studio in the wake of the success of homegrown Johnny Depp vehicle Rango in 2011. Marvel's arrangement has already finished and the comic book studio's films will be distributed by parent company Disney next year.


As previously reported, US box office revenues last year were down 3.4% from 2010, with attendance hitting a 16-year low, but improving returns from the rest of the world – including growth areas such as China – took up some of the strain.

How far do the narratives of the films you have studied for this topic explore questions of belonging and exclusion?

            Both of the films I have studied – My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999) – explore the ideas of belonging and exclusion, particularly through the themes of sexuality and race. My Beautiful Laundrette is a comedy-drama about the relationship between Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), a white punk, and Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a second generation Pakistani living in London in the ‘80s. East is East is a comedy-drama that follows the lives of the mixed-race Khan family, which consists of traditional Pakistani patriarch George (Om Puri), his British wife Ella (Linda Bassett), their six sons and only daughter.

In My Beautiful Laundrette the theme of isolation is presented from the first scene through the way in which Johnny is violently thrown out of the house he is squatting in, which also reflects the fact that he is living in poverty. Additionally his and his friends’ punk style acts as a symbolic signifier of the ‘80s and connotes the theme of racism immediately, due to punks’ stereotypically right-wing political outlook. This could be interpreted as suggesting that Johnny has a place where he belongs as that he fits in with a group of friends, but him being evicted could imply that despite his white privilege, he doesn’t belong here either. It could also be suggested that Johnny is excluded from society not only because of his social class, but also because of his homosexuality, which was still somewhat taboo in the 1980s. Then the audience are introduced to Omar, who has taken on his dead mother’s role in the house as shown by him washing and hanging out clothes. The small dingy flat gives the film a claustrophobic feeling, and the constant trains passing in the background act as a morbid reminder of his mother’s suicide, making it seem as though Omar is bordered in by his life.

            However his father then finds him a job with his uncle, which could be his path to belonging in London and was also very valuable at a time of economic despair. It is clear from the contrast between Nasser and Salim’s suits and Omar’s jeans and trainers that they are in different classes. This is enforced when Salim at first mistakes Omar for a thief and then later says, “at least you’ll be able to afford a clean shirt, Mrs Thatcher will be happy with me.” Nasser has obviously acquired a sense of belonging in Britain, as reflected in his wealth and glamorous white mistress, Rachel, who acts as his route to acceptance in the white community, whilst Omar’s socialist father, Hussein, resents Britain and its politics, preferring to drink himself into oblivion. This leaves Omar in no-man’s land between staying true to his Pakistani roots and settling down in Britain. The class divide is highlighted further when Nasser and Rachel take Omar to a bar and Nasser says, “Have you ever been to a high class place like this before? I suppose you spend most of your time in your black hole flat,” implying the restrictions placed on Omar due to his financial status.

Another way in which Omar is excluded is because of his sexuality. Throughout the film other characters make innuendos about it, such as Hussein saying, “Fix him up with a nice girl, I’m not sure his penis is in full working order” and Salim instructing him on how to polish a car: “You know how to rub don’t you?” At the time, and even now, it was the hegemonic norm to be straight and Omar’s relatives did not know about his true sexuality, although Johnny hinted at it: “In my experience it’s always worth waiting for Omar.”

Likewise, in East is East, the idea of exclusion due to sexuality is explored through the character of Nazir, who runs out on an arranged marriage in the opening scene of the film and is later found running a successful hat shop with his boyfriend by his younger siblings. George disowns him for having disgraced the family, stating in one point of the film that he has only seven children and removing his photo from the wall, but Ella defends her son in an argument with George: “he may be dead to you but he’s still my son.”

The Khan family are somewhat excluded in society as a whole by their neighbour Mr Moorhouse, a supporter of the controversial right-wing political figure Enoch Powell. However, his grandson Earnest is best friends with the youngest son of the Khan family, Sajid, and his granddaughter Stella is having a secret relationship with Tariq Khan. She expresses her disregard of her grandfather’s racist tendencies by comparing their relationship to that of Romeo and Juliet and saying, “'I’ll never let the colour of your Dad come between us,” which suggests that she sees Tariq as white British, like his mother, rather than Pakistani, like his father. This could be indicative of the way in which Tariq and the other children see themselves as well, particularly as Tariq arguably fits in with British society the most out of all the children: he has a white girlfriend and regularly goes clubbing in secret under the name of Tony to hide his Pakistani roots. This is enforced by Tariq’s reaction when he finds out his dad is planning an arranged marriage for him: “I’m not marrying a fucking Paki!” The use of this derogative term suggests that he resents the Pakistani part of himself, although George argues that Tariq will never belong in England in an argument with him. When Tariq disowns his father’s nationality – “Dad, I’m not Pakistani. I was born here. I speak English, not Urdu.” – George says, “You’re not English, English people will never accept you.”

However, whilst the family may not be accepted in England, it could also be said that they are not accepted by Pakistanis either. When the Shah family come round to arrange the marriages of Tariq and Abdul and their two daughters, they show obvious distaste for the Khans, referring to them as a “jungly family of half-breeds”, and Ella as “a disgrace”. This implies that, like Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette, as second generational Pakistanis, the Khan children are torn between British and Asian cultures.