Sundance Day Nine: Awards!

Actress Jess Weixler accepts the a Sundance Special Jury Prize Acting Award for her performance in the film "Teeth." She plays a woman whose vagina has some special features. And director Jason Kohn picks up the Grand Jury Prize for his documentary about crime culture in Brazil, "Manda Bala."

In today’s final Sundance-related post, the winners of this year’s festival were announced this weekend. It was a very democratic mix, with no movie scoring more than one major award, and no trail-blazing frontrunner emerging as a sure-fire box-office or critical threat barreling toward a movie house near you. The John Cusack-starring road-trip drama, Grace Is Gone, about a husband whose wife gets killed in the Iraq War, won the Audience Award for Best Dramatic Feature. And the Audience Award for Best Documentary went to Hear and Now, in which director Irene Taylor Brodsky tells the story of her deaf parents who decided to get cochlear implant surgery, a procedure that gives them the ability to hear, after 65 years of silence.

And the Grand Jury Prizes went to Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala for Best Documentary, for its chronicle of corruption and survival in Brazil’s violent crime culture. And the jury gave Best Dramatic Feature kudos to Padre Nuestro, about a criminal who encounters illegal immigrants en route from Mexico City to New York.

No big gay-themed films snagged honors, but the short, Freeheld, about a dying New Jersey Lieutenant, Laurel Hester, who fights to make sure her pension benefits go to her life partner Stacie, scored a Special Jury Prize for documentary short film for director Cynthia Wade. And actress Jess Weixler scored a Special Jury Prize for Acting for starring as a woman with special features down below in the “vagina dentata” tale, Teeth, by openly gay director Mitchell Lichtenstein.

You can watch some video of festival-goers naming their faves of the week, and catch video of the award-winners picking up their prizes here.

At the closing night gala at Sundance featuring the film "Life Support," the movie's producer Jamie Foxx mugs with actress Gloria Reuben, director Nelson George and the film's star Queen Latifah.

See ya next Sundance...