Sundance Film Festival closed out its highly anticipated return to Park City, Utah over the weekend with its annual awards ceremony, recognizing the standout films and documentaries that moved audiences and impressed judges.
The highest honor went to writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a plot-bending drama focusing on the determination of a young mother going through hardship in 1990’s New York City, expertly played by Teyana Taylor.
According to Variety, Sundance U.S. dramatic jury member and playwright Jeremy O. Harris became emotional as he presented the coveted Grand Jury Prize for Drama to Rockwell, admitting that he was so moved by the film that he had to step out of the screening to cry privately outside.
A Thousand and One finds Taylor as Inez, a young mother recently released from Rikers Island in mid-90’s NYC who kidnaps her 6-year-old son from foster care, moving from shelter to shelter with hopes of making a new life for both of them. Though the plot sounds like typical “Black struggle” fare, reviews note big plot twists and surprising story arcs that take this film far beyond the conventional.
On the documentary front, the Grand Jury Prize was easily awarded to Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. Featuring personal accounts and interviews with the famed poet, the film focuses on Giovanni’s personal perspective and private nature, including her personal attestation that she remembers only what she wants to remember and makes everything else up.
The Special Jury Award for Clarity of Vision was awarded to directors Kristen Lovell & Zackary Drucke for The Stroll, an unflinching look at the history of New York’s Meatpacking District as a hotbed of sex work for Black trans women, from the perspectives of those who lived it firsthand.
Lovell speaks firsthand of her own experience, mixed in with rare archival footage of the infamous Meatpacking District and the people who lived and worked there by night, before high-end retailers, boutique hotels, and expensive trendy restaurants made it a playground for hipsters and tourists.
Another Black trans woman, D. Smith, took home not one, but two awards for her honest view of often overlooked LGBTQIA+ stories. The format-defying Kokomo City was awarded both the NEXT Audience Award and the NEXT Innovator Award for its firsthand accounts of and musings on Black trans identity – an often maligned and misunderstood state of being.
The result is a frank, unapologetic, non-PC, and sometimes shocking account of the lives, bodies, and sexual activity while unpacking notions of masculinity, femininity, gender roles, and why trans identity is such a lightning rod topic in the Black community in particular.
The Special Jury Award for Creative Vision went to the creative team behind Magazine Dreams directed by Elijah Bynum and starring Jonathan Majors.
Likely to be one of the most talked about films of the year, the film focuses on Killian (Majors) an aspiring bodybuilder with social anxieties and little to no connection to others, yet who longs to be loved and remembered by people everywhere.