Sundance Film Festival Award Winners Announced (Updating Live)

Penélope Cruz will be honored at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival with the 2022 Montecito Award, which recognizes an actor’s career achievements and is named for one of the beautiful and stylish areas in Santa Barbara.Cruz was recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Supporting Actress category for her work in Pedro Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers.”“In the most complex role written by the master Almodovar, Penelope Cruz delivers the best performance of her career and a master class in calibration and detailed acting,” SBIFF’s executive director Roger Durling said in a statement. “In my book, she’s one of the great performers of our time.”In “Parallel Mothers,” two women, Janis (Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit), meet in a hospital room where they are going to give birth.

Guy Lodge Film CriticThe Berlin Film Festival’s awards ceremony is under way, with M. Night Shyamalan’s jury soon to announce their selections from the festival’s official competition.

Winners are being announced for the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival. Follow the ceremony live via the below video feed from 7PM CET / 10AM PST, with the red carpet now underway.

Naman Ramachandran The 36th edition of BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival will open with Alli Haapasalo’s “Girl Picture” and close with Kevin Hegge‘s documentary “Tramps!” “Girl Picture,” which won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance in January and will screen at the Berlinale next week, follows three girls at the cusp of womanhood. Over three consecutive Fridays, two of them experience the effects of falling in love, while the third goes on a quest to find something she’s never experienced – pleasure.Feature documentary “Tramps,” world premiering at the festival, looks at how in London in the 1980’s, an onslaught of art students arriving in the city resulted in a unique cross-fertilization of British art, fashion, music and film culminating in a group known as The New Romantics.

Selome Hailu Film Independent has named the winners of three unrestricted $25,000 Spirit Awards cash grants for emerging filmmakers: Alex Camilleri, Lizzie Shapiro and Jessica Beshir. The announcements were made by Ekwa Msangi (“Farewell Amor”), Gerry Kim (“I’m No Longer Here”) and Elegance Bratton (“Pier Kids”), who received the grants last year.Camilleri, director of “Luzzu,” received the Someone to Watch Award. The award is in its 28th year and recognizes talented filmmakers of singular vision who have not yet received appropriate recognition.

The 72nd Berlin Film Festival kicks off in physical form today with M. Night Shyamalan leading the main competition jury. Also notable among panelists is Oscar nominee Ryusuke Hamaguchi whose Drive My Car this week became the first Japanese movie ever nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. Hamaguchi was actually on a plane heading to Berlin when the nominations were announced, and only learned of the results upon landing.

Honorable Mentions: Ultrainocencia (Dir: Manuel Arija)Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize: Forget Me Not (Dir: Olivier Bernier)Honorable Mention: Fury (Dir: Krzysztof Kasior)Breakouts Feature Grand Jury Prize: Killing the Eunuch KHAN (Dir: Abed Abest)Honorable Mentions: Retrograde (Dir: Adrian Murray)Unstoppable Feature Grand Jury Prize: Straighten Up And Fly Right (Dir: Kristen Abate and StevenTanenbaum)Honorable Mentions: Selahy (My Weapon) (Dir: Alaa Zabara)Narrative Shorts Grand Jury Prize: Ratking (Dir: Eric Colonna)Honorable Mention: See You, Garbage! (Dir: Romain Dumont)Documentary Short Grand Jury Prize: The Ritual to Beauty (Dir: Shenny de Los Angeles and MariaMarrone)Honorable Mention: Walls Cannot Keep Us From Flying (Dir: Jonathan Haff Mehring)Experimental Shorts Grand Jury Prize: Chameleon (Dir: Ima Iduozee and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko)Honorable Mention: Compositions for Understanding Relationships (Dir: David De La Fuente)Animated Shorts Grand Jury Prize: I’m Here (Dir: Julia Orlik)Honorable Mention: Oldboy’s Apples (Dir: Brad Hock)The AGBO Fellowship, presented by Joe and Anthony Russo, Award Winner: Ethan Eng, director ofTherapy DogsSlamdance Acting Award: Hannah Lee Thompson of Hannah Ha HaHonorable Mention: Batel Moseri of BrachaGeorge Starks Spirit of Slamdance Award Winner: Sasha Levinson, director of Sylvie of the SunshineStateCreativeFuture Innovation Award: My Parent, Neal (Dir: Hannah Saidiner)Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature: The Civil Dead (Dir. Clay Tatum)Audience Award for Documentary Feature: Iron Family (Dir.

Chris Willman Music WriterSheryl Crow, Nick Cave, King Crimson, Dio, XXXTentacion, Tanya Tucker, Chumbawamba, Courtney Barnett, Cesária Évora and Mojo Nixon — together again for the first time: These are some of the highly diverse subjects of a slate of music documentaries (or, in the case of Tierra Whack, a fictional film) set to unspool at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin March 11-20.The 16 movies represented in the “24 Beats Per Second” lineup are nearly all world premieres, in a film festival that skews toward SXSW’s original roots as a pure music festival by always carving out a special category for features that chronicle musicians or music scenes.The music doc coming into the festival with probably the highest level of fan anticipation is , which promises to have director Sabaah Folayan offering “a sensitive portrayal” of a precocious, highly controversial, Soundcloud-based rapper “whose acts of violence, raw musical talent and open struggles with mental health left an indelible mark on his generation before his death at the age of 20.” While many of the festival entries are looking for a sale from their exposure at SXSW, “Look at Me!” is already set to stream on Hulu this summer. Joining the artist profiles in the film lineup are documentaries about the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” by co-directors Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, and rubber bridge guitars, in “Really Good Rejects,” a film that will have producer Aaron Dessner talking about using them on Taylor Swift’s recent folkier albums.Some of the films promise to be complete life and career chronicles, like those devoted to Crow, Barnett and Dio.

Sundance Film Festival closed its second virtual edition on Sunday, having fielded a few breakout new films and filmmakers, as well as some big sales.With the indie film box office in the doldrums, many of the most aggressive buyers were streaming giants, which have both an insatiable need for content and a desire to generate some awards buzz. While some of the movies received a more muted reception than in past years, when a standing ovation at Park City’s Eccles Theater was enough to trigger an all-night bidding war, there’s been no shortage of headline-making moments.

Dispatches from the Sundance Film Festival are usually accompanied by descriptions of the looming mountains, snowy premieres and frantic bus shuttles. This year's Sundance, which played out entirely virtually due to the COVID-19 surge driven by the omicron variant, meant less evocative screening circumstances: Laptops, digital links and Zooms.But even in reduced form, the films were often hypnotic, thrilling and urgent.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterIn another era, traditional movie studios would have exhaustively battled to buy a Sundance Film Festival crowd-pleaser like “Cha Cha Real Smooth” in the hopes of turning critical raves into the next theatrical hit.“Cha Cha Real Smooth,” writer-director Cooper Raiff’s charming story about a budding friendship between an aimless college grad and a young mother, seemed tailor-made to charm the snow boots off Sundance buyers — and it did. Apple TV Plus outbid competitors and bought the movie for $15 million, the biggest sale at this year’s festival.

Sigh. We were oh-so close to spotting Kanye West stomping around in snow boots on Main Street. But just a few weeks before the Sundance Film Festival was scheduled to kick off in Park City, Utah, plans got scrapped because of you-know-what. Long gone are the days of celebrities popping into random screenings — fun fact: I once caught James Franco dozing off during a documentary about Scientology — and rationalizing a meal of popcorn and diet Coke for breakfast and chatting to strangers on the local bus about the cool new movie you saw.

Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger have inspired one of the new films at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe virtual Sundance Film Festival concluded with a virtual awards show, announcing the winners via social media in a series of tweeted statements and videos.After hosting an abridged version of the 2021 edition virtually, Sundance organizers hoped to return with a hybrid online and in-person (Park City, Utah-based) event this year, but rising COVID-19 infections due to the Omicron variant forced them to shift the program online again. With the infrastructure already in place, the festival was able to make the pivot to the safer model, while losing out on much of the excitement and attention generated by the pre-pandemic model.The full list of winners appears below — UPDATING LIVE: Grand Jury Prize: “”Audience Award: “”Directing:Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: “”Special Jury Award: “”Grand Jury Prize: “”Audience Award: “”Directing: “”Special Jury Award: “”Grand Jury Prize: “”Audience Award: “”Directing Award: “”Special Jury Award: “”Grand Jury Prize: “”Audience Award: “”Directing Award: “”Special Jury Award: “”Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize: “After Yang”Sundance Institute NHK Award: Hasan Hadi, “The President’s Cake”Sundance Institute/Amazon Studios Producers Award for Narrative Features: Amanda Marshall, “God’s Country”Sundance Institute/Amazon Studios Producers Award for Documentary Features: Su Kim, “Free Chol Soo Lee”Sundance Institute/Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Documentary: Toby Shimin

said upon introducing the awards ceremony. “This year’s festival expressed a powerful convergence; we were present, together, as a community connected through the work. And it is work that has already changed those who experienced it,” festival director Tabitha Jackson added.

EXCLUSIVE: Searchlight Pictures has emerged as the favorite to acquire Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, the Sophie Hyde-directed drama that stars Emma Thompson as a widow who decides to seek out something that has eluded her over a 31-year marriage: a proper, mind-blowing, toe-curling orgasm. Negotiations are underway and will hopefully climax into the first narrative film deal at 2022 Sundance, after a weekend of foreplay but no consummation beyond the docu Fire of Love.

Wilson Chapman editorThe Miami Film Festival has announced its opening and closing titles for its upcoming 39th edition.The festival, which showcases works from filmmaker’s in the Ibero-American diaspora, will premiere and end with two films listed on the Oscar shortlist for international feature film. “The Good Boss” (El Buen Patrón), a comedy written and directed by Spain’s Fernando León de Aranoa, will open the festival, which will close with “Plaza Catedral,” the sophomore narrative feature of Panamanian director Abner Benaim.“The Good Boss” stars Javier Bardem as Blanco, the owner of a family business up for consideration for a local award for business excellence. Determined to win the award, Blanco begins meddling in the lives of his employees, setting off a chain of events that leads to shocking repercussions.

$25 million Apple paid for “CODA,” the $15 million Netflix paid for “Passing” or documentary-record $15 million Searchlight/Hulu paid for “Summer of Soul.”  There’s still plenty of time for dealmaking, but not much time for new films to grab the spotlight: All of the festival’s movies were programmed to launch in the first five days, with Monday’s lineup – which included “Emily the Criminal,” “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” “Dos Estaciones,” “The Janes” and “Am I OK?” – scheduled as the last of this year’s premieres.

As you’ve hopefully heard by now, and read our review, the Sundance film, “Something In The Dirt” is a big hit. From filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who I like to describe as DIY versions of Christopher Nolan—that is to say ambitious, cerebral, complex sci-fi, horror, and genre films, but done on a lo-fi scale—“Something In The Dirt” is a swirl of all their previous heady, high-concept ideas, but with a big dose of humor and a deep look at the world of phenomenon, conspiracy theories and even pareidolia or apophenia (essentially the phenomenon of seeing patterns, consistencies and correlations of things that just aren’t there).