Sundance Awards: ‘The Persian Versian’, ‘Kokomo City’ Among Repeat Winners As ‘A Thousand And One’, ‘Going To Mars’ Claim U.S. Grand Jury Prizes - Deadline

The Sundance Film Festival has unveiled its Jury and Audience Award winners for 2023.

The day’s large winners included Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version, which claimed some the Audience Award and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award successful U.S. Dramatic Competition, arsenic good arsenic A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, which took the Grand Jury Prize successful the aforesaid section.

Other titles taking apical awards included Festival Favorite Radical from filmmaker Christopher Zalla and 3Pas Studios; Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project from Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, which took the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary; Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia, which took the U.S. Documentary Audience Award; and D. Smith’s Kokomo City, which dominated the NEXT conception arsenic it claimed some the Innovator and Audience Award.

Jurors contiguous for the awards announcement, livestreamed to the festival’s societal media channels from The Ray Theatre successful Park City, Utah, included Jeremy O. Harris and Marlee Matlin for U.S. Dramatic Competition, Ramona Diaz and Carla Gutierrez for U.S. Documentary Competition, Funa Maduka for World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and Madeleine Olnek for NEXT.

The 2023 festival featured 111 features and 64 shorts, selected from 15,856 submissions, which were screened successful Park City, Salt Lake City, and astatine the Sundance Resort. Over 75% of some abbreviated and feature-length works, on with galore selected Indie Episodics, volition beryllium disposable for streaming via the fest’s online level done January 29.

Sundance’s archetypal in-person festival since the Covid pandemic was marked by a fig of large income — astir of which we were archetypal to study on. The archetypal rubric to fastener successful a immense woody was Chloe Domont’s thriller Fair Play, starring Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, which went to Netflix for astir $20MM. John Carney’s philharmonic play Flora and Son, starring Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, went to Apple for astir the same, with Searchlight taking the improvised ensemble drama Theater Camp for astir $8 million. Mubi picked up Ira Sachs’ narration play Passages, with A24 successful talks to get the buzzy Midnight rubric Talk to Me arsenic of Tuesday.

Last year’s Sundance ceremonial solidified the awards trajectory of 4 of 5 contenders for the Documentary Feature Oscar successful 2023 — those titles being Navalny (Documentary Competition Audience Award, Festival Favorite Award), Fire of Love (Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award), All That Breathes (World Cinema Documentary Competition Documentary Prize) and A House Made of Splinters (World Cinema Documentary Competition Directing Award). The festival proved adjacent much applicable to the awards contention the twelvemonth prior, with Sian Heder’s Best Picture Oscar victor CODA and Questlove’s Best Doc Winner Summer of Soul highlighting its digit connected the pulse crossed some communicative and documentary.

View the 2023 winners’ database below.

FESTIVAL FAVORITE AWARD

Radical
Director: Christopher Zalla

U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION

Grand Jury Prize

A Thousand And One
Director: A.V. Rockwell

Audience Award

The Persian Version
Director: Maryam Keshavarz

Directing Award

Sing J. Lee
The Accidental Getaway Driver

Jury Award: Creative Vision

Magazine Dreams
Director: Elijah Bynum

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award

Maryam Keshavarz
The Persian Version

Special Jury Award: Acting

Lio Mehiel
Mutt

Jury Award: Ensemble 

Theater Camp
Directors: Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

Grand Jury Prize

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Directors: Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson

Audience Award

Beyond Utopia
Director: Madeleine Gavin

Directing Award

Luke Lorentzen
A Still Small Voice

Special Jury Award: Clarity of Vision

The Stroll
Directors: Kristen Lovell, Zackary Drucker

Special Jury Award: Freedom of Expression

Bad Press
Directors: Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, Joe Peeler

Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award

Daniela I. Quiroz
Going Varsity successful Mariachi

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

Audience Award

20 Days successful Mariupol (Ukraine)
Director: Mstylav Chernov

Grand Jury Prize

The Eternal Memory (Chile)
Director: Maite Alberdi

Directing Award

Against the Tide (India)
Director: Sarvnik Kaur

Special Jury Award: Creative Vision

Fantastic Machine (Sweden/Denmark)
Director: Axel Danielson

WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION

Audience Award

Shayda (Australia)
Director: Noora Niasari

Grand Jury Prize

Scrapper (UK)
Director: Charlotte Regan 

Directing Award

Marija Kavtaradze
Slow (Lithuania/Spain/Sweden)

Special Jury Award: Creative Vision

Animalia (France/Morocco/Qatar)
Director: Sofia Alaoui

Special Jury Award: Best Performance

Rosa Marchant
When It Melts (Belgium/Netherlands)

Special Jury Award: Cinematography

Lílis Soares
Mami Wata (Nigeria)

NEXT

Audience Award

Kokomo City 
Director: D. Smith

Innovator Award

Kokomo City
Director: D. Smith

SHORT FILMS AWARDS

Grand Jury Prize

When You Left Me On That Boulevard (U.S.A.)
Director: Kayla Abuda Galang

Jury Award: US Fiction

Rest Stop
Director: Crystal Kayiza

Jury Award: Directing, International

Valeria Hofmann
AliEN0089 (Chile)

Jury Award: Directing, US

Jarreau Carrillo
The Vacation

Jury Award: Animation

The Flying Sailor
Directors: Wendy Tilby, Amanda Forbis (Canada)

Jury Award: Nonfiction

Will You Look At Me (China)
Director: Shuli Huang

Jury Award: International Fiction

The Kidnapping of the Bride (Germany)
Director: Sophia Mocorrea

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED WINNERS

Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize

The Pod Generation
Director: Sophie Barthes

Amazon Studios Nonfiction Award 

Jess Devaney
It’s Only Life After All

Amazon Studios Fiction Award

Kara Durrett
The Starling Girl

Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Nonfiction

Mary Manhardt

Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Fiction

Troy Takaki

Sundance/NHK Award 

Olive Nwosu
Lady

Sundance Institute | Stars Collective Imagination Awards 

Tamara Shogaolu 
40 Acres

Navid Khonsari, Vassiliki Khonsari, and Andres Perez-Duarte 
Block Party Bodega

Vanessa Keith 
Year 2180

Gayle Stevens Volunteer Award

Carlos Sanchez