The "Dance" Finals

The 2007 Sundance Film Festival came to an end last night in Park City Utah...Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly reports on this year's award winners:

Political films take Sundance's top prizes...

Movies dealing with the Iraq war, international corruption, and immigration win jury awards in the feature and documentary categories

The issues of the day were clearly on the minds of Sundance 2007's audiences and juries, as they collectively awarded some of the most topical films at the festival. Padre Nuestro, a dark thriller about two young Mexican men smuggled into New York City, won the feature grand jury prize at the festival, the second Mexican-themed film in a row to win the festival's top prize (last year's winner was the sweet-15 film Quinceañera).

Director and screenwriter of "Padre Nuestro," Christopher Zalla, left, accepts the grand-jury prize for best U.S. drama for the film during the Sundance Film Festival Awards Night on Jan. 27 as Sundance Festival Director Geoff Gilmore joins him on stage in Park City, Utah.

Grace Is Gone, a drama starring John Cusack as a father facing the daunting task of telling his two young daughters that their mother was killed in the Iraq war, won the coveted audience award, voted on by practically every person who saw the eligible films during the 10-day festival. Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

Feature documentary Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), which explores a vast network of corruption, kidnapping, and money-laundering frog farms in modern Brazil, took home the U.S. documentary jury prize. No End in Sight was awarded a special jury prize for its probing insight into the failures of the Bush administration's Iraq war policies. The film's director, Charles Ferguson, emphasized in his acceptance speech that he did not wish to make a political film, but he won thunderous applause by concluding with the statement that ''it might be too late for Iraq, but I hope it isn't too late for this country to conduct itself differently in the future.''...

I grant you, the situation in Iraq is not good at the moment, but who's to say it can't improve...or won't. And for Ferguson to say he hopes it's not too late for this country....just how bad is it in the US right now Chuck? I wonder what he would have said in his acceptance speech if a Democrat were in office and had authorized troops in Iraq?

Ahem...

Steven Zeitchik and Pamela McClintock of Variety report on some of the deals that were made while the festival was still in full swing in Delirious deals and deals aplenty...