At the 2015 Sundance Film Fest, the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize of 20,000, presented annually to a film that focuses on science/technology as a theme, was given to “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s dramatic reconstruction of the eponymous 1971 study conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
The Sundance Institute/NHK Award for a visionary emerging filmmaker was presented to French director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, whose short film “Rabbit” screened in competition at the festival.
A special mention was awarded to Japanese director Hiroshi Kurosaki’s “Prometheus Fire.”
Recipients of the Sundance Institute’s Global Filmmaking Award were Saudi Arabia’s Haifaa Al Mansour for “Be Safe I Love You”; Somalia’s K’naan for “The Poet”; Ukraine’s Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy (“The Tribe”) for “Luxembourg”; and Germany’s Oskar Sulowski for “Rosebuds.”
The ceremony was hosted by standup comedian Tig Notaro, who noted that she used to be a Sundance volunteer in the mid- to late 1990s. She took the opportunity to tell the first joke she ever wrote, when she was 6 years old: “What consists of a naval army? Belly buttons.”
Notaro is the subject of Ashley York’s in-competition documentary, “Tig,” one of several comedy docs at this year’s fest, including Bobcat Goldthwait’s “Call Me Lucky” and Kevin Pollak’s “Misery Loves Comedy.”
