International winners
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This is a list of winners for the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for dramatic features.
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Darren Aronofsky is an American filmmaker. His films are noted for their surreal, melodramatic, and often disturbing elements, frequently in the form of psychological fiction.
Victor Nunez is a film director, professor at the Florida State University College of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts, and a founding member of the Independent Feature Project and Sundance Film Festival. He is best known for directing the critically acclaimed films A Flash of Green, Ruby in Paradise and Ulee's Gold. In 2008 Nunez was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and he is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Indiewood films are made outside of the Hollywood studio system or traditional arthouse/independent filmmaking system yet managed to be produced, financed and distributed by the two with varying degrees of success and/or failure.
Ava Marie DuVernay is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. She is a recipient of two Primetime Emmy Awards, two NAACP Image Award, a BAFTA Film Award, and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee for an Academy Award and Golden Globe. In 2011, she founded her independent distribution company ARRAY.
I Will Follow is a 2010 American independent drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay, who also produced the film with Molly Mayeux. It stars Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Omari Hardwick, Blair Underwood and Beverly Todd.
Middle of Nowhere is a 2012 American independent drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Emayatzy Corinealdi, David Oyelowo, Omari Hardwick and Lorraine Toussaint. The film was the winner of the Directing Award for U.S. Dramatic Film at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Bradford Marcel Young, A.S.C is an American cinematographer. He is best known for his work on the films Selma, A Most Violent Year, Arrival (2016)—which earned him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography—and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), as well as the Netflix miniseries When They See Us (2019).
Lauren Wolkstein is an American film director, writer, producer and editor. She is known for directing, writing, and editing the 2017 film The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff and serving on the directorial team for the third season of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar, which she followed with a producing director role in the fifth season. She is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Howard Barish is president and CEO of Kandoo Films, an Oscar nominated, Emmy award-winning entertainment company known for its producing partnership with Ava DuVernay. Barish and Kandoo's most recognized project to date, 13th, is a 2016 American documentary from Netflix directed by DuVernay. Centered on race in the United States criminal justice system, the critically lauded film is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery. It argues that slavery is being effectively perpetuated through mass incarceration.
The Black Reel Award for Outstanding Director is an award presented annually by the Black Reel Awards (BRA). It is given in honor of a film director who has exhibited outstanding directing while working in the film industry.
Storm Reid is an American actress. After early roles in the television show A Cross to Bear (2012), the drama film 12 Years a Slave (2013), and the superhero film Sleight (2016), she played the lead role of Meg Murry in the fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time (2018). She garnered further recognition with roles in the thriller film Don't Let Go (2019) and the horror film The Invisible Man (2020).
Passing is a 2021 American historical drama film written and directed by Rebecca Hall in her feature directorial debut. It is adapted from the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen. Set in 1920s New York City, the film follows the intertwined life of a black woman and her white-passing childhood friend. Appearing in supporting roles are André Holland, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, and Alexander Skarsgård. It was filmed in black-and-white.
Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. The film centers on the anti-gay purges in Chechnya of the late 2010s, filming LGBT Chechen refugees using hidden cameras as they made their way out of Russia through a network of safehouses aided by activists.
Feels Good Man is a 2020 American documentary film about the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Marking the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, the film stars artist Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe. The film follows Furie as he struggles to reclaim control of Pepe from members of the alt-right who have co-opted the image for their own purposes. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. It was also nominated in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance. Sometime in the 2020s, ranging from 2023 to 2024, the film was added to FAST service Pluto TV in Canada.
Radha Blank is an American actress, filmmaker, playwright, rapper, and comedian. Born and raised in New York City, Blank is known for writing, directing, producing, and starring in The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), for which she won the U.S. Dramatic Competition Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival making Radha, after Ava DuVernay, only the second Black Woman Director in Sundance’s 40 year history to win the award.
CODA is a 2021 coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Sian Heder. An English-language remake of the 2014 French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the child of deaf adults (CODA) and only hearing member of her family, who attempts to help her family's struggling fishing business while pursuing her aspirations to become a singer.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 20 to 30, 2022. Due to COVID-19 pandemic protocol, it was initially intended to be an in-person/virtual hybrid festival, but on January 5, 2022, it was announced that the in-person components would be scrapped in favor of a wholly virtual festival due to the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. The first lineup of competition films was announced on December 9, 2021.
This is the list of the winners of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features.
This is a list of winners of the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for dramatic features.