POLLYWOOD | SPOTLIGHT: INDEPENDENT FILMS

Looking at the Festival's Highest Awards Winners

Sundance has also been a beacon for leading independent film award winners, and 2006's award winners are no different in their appeal and importance. Their stories, however, are as diverse as the people who made them.

GOD GREW TIRED OF US

WINNER: Grand Jury Prize for

Documentary WINNER: Audience Award for Documentary

Looking for reprieve from the civil war raging in Sudan in the late 1980's, 27,000 "lost boys" set out on a barefoot march

over thousands of miles of desolate desert. Half were killed by bombing raids and starvation, while the rest now live together in a Kenyan refugee camp. The U.S. has invited some of the boys to settle in America.

Director Christopher Quinn, a D.C. native, follows three of these immigrants as they adjust to lives completely different from anything they have imagined. They marvel at Western customs, find menial jobs and have enough to eat for the first time in their lives, but nonetheless miss the camaraderie and brotherhood that allowed them to survive in Africa.

IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS

WINNER: Directing Award for Documentary

Director James Longley allows viewers to hear and see what they rarely get a chance to do on the news: the opinions and concerns of normal Iraqi citizens caught in the middle of the conflict between the United States and their country.

"Iraq in Fragments" follows an 11-year-old mechanic in war-torn Baghdad, a young leader in the Shiite revolutionary movement and a Kurdish farmer who says he is grateful to America for ousting Saddam. This unique look at those who are often forgotten offers a humanizing view of its characters and gives a sense of a country dealing with struggles both internal and external.

A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS

WINNER: Dramatic Directing Award

WINNER: Dramatic Jury Special Jury Prize for best ensemble performance

Montiel's first film, is based on his upbringing in Astoria, Queens; the "saints" are the people he remembers from that neighborhood, he is the one that got out. The director, who was kicked out of school for fighting and toured in a van with a hardcore band, guides an outstanding cast that

infuses truth into this bittersweet tale of memories.

DEAR PYONGYANG

WINNER: World Cinema

Documentary Jury Special Jury Prize

Chronicling the relationship between a Korean father and his Japanese-born daughter as she tells the story of his devotion to the vision of a unified, communist Korea, Yonghi Yang's "Dear Pyongyang" provides westerners with a rare look inside North Korea.

Yang, raised in Japan, probes her father about his radical choices, which included sending his three teenaged sons to live in North Korea forever in 1971. Over an hour and forty minutes, the viewer sees a man staunch in what he believes, but also willing to change.