‘CODA’ Wins Four Awards at Sundance 2021
View(s):The mostly virtual 2021 Sundance Film Festival is coming to a close. The festival announced awards winners Tuesday night, trading an in-person ceremony for one broadcast live and hosted by Patton Oswalt.
The biggest winner was Sian Heder’s coming of age drama ‘CODA’, which earned four U.S. Dramatic Competition awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. Other Big winners were ‘Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised),’ which took home the two top U.S. Documentary awards.
Blerta Basholli’s ‘Hive’ won three awards in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition: the Directing and Audience awards and the Grand Jury Prize. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s ‘Writing with Fire’ earned two World Cinema Documentary awards.
A total of 72 features screened over the last week, along with 50 shorts, four Indie Series, and 14 New Frontier VR/new media projects.
Those projects were judged by a jury made up of Zeynep Atakan, Raúl Castillo, Ashley Clark, Julie Dash, Tacita Dean, Cynthia Erivo, Isaac Julien, Inge de Leeuw, Kim Longinotto, Laura Mulleavy, Kate Mulleavy, Joshua Oppenheimer, Mohamed Ouma Saïd, Jean Tsien, Daniela Vega, Lana Wilson, and Hanya Yanagihara.
Though this year marked the first virtual festival, the festival opened strong with a parade of buzzy titles that earned critical acclaim, including Sian Heder’s drama about a deaf family and their hearing daughter, ‘CODA’; Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated refugee documentary ‘Flee’; and Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s music documentary ‘Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).’