Awards

While visiting the set of The Man Who Never Cried last fall, I was amused by the t-shirt worn by director Bradley Jackson (above on the right, with lead Keir O'Donnell, left). The phrase across his chest read "Please Lord, Let me Prove to You That Winning The Lottery Won't Spoil Me."

Jackson will have to do just that, with the recent announcement that the $100,000 grand prize for the Doorpost Film Project went to The Man Who Never Cried. The local film that received tips and script edits from the likes of Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater and other industry veterans. In addition to winning first place, the film took several other awards at last week's awards ceremony, including the Audience Choice Award. Find out what other honors the local independent film received are after the jump:

aGLIFF knows how to party. I know from experience: the crowds are fun, witty and very welcoming. So just imagine their annual Red Carpet Gala complete with a live Academy Awards telecast this year, so big it's moving to Austin Studios. If anyone can create celebrity sensation, aGLIFF's party planners can.

On Sunday, February 27, paparazzi, a red carpet and a champagne reception await you as the hostess with the mostest, Rebecca Havermeyer, will be on hand to greet you like the Austin celebrity you are. When you get to your private table, your waiter will be ready with some Oscar-themed cocktails, starting at 5:30 pm. Above, you can see Miz Havermeyer chatting up then-Austin filmmaker Kyle Henry, whose Fourplay: San Francisco short played aGLIFF 2010 with overwhelmingly positive reactions. (Henry's in Chicago now, but we still can't stop thinking of him as belonging to Austin.)

Last year, the Austin connections at the Oscars were easy to spot: actress Sandra Bullock and musician Ryan Bingham, both of whom brought home the little gold guys. This year, Austin is a little less obvious in the Academy Award nominations, but you can still find local connections if you poke around a bit. Let's hope some of these folks walk away with awards next month:

• John Hawkes: Supporting Actor, Winter's Bone -- Hawkes (pictured at right) started his career in Austin before his role in this excellent movie, which played SXSW 2010. You can find him in a couple of Austin-shot movies, too: he's in Eve's Necklace and going back a few years, plays a liquor-store clerk in From Dusk Til Dawn.
• Dogtooth: Foreign Language Film, Greece -- One of the film's producers is Athina Rachel Tsangari, a filmmaker who divides her time between Greece and Austin. She was an executive producer on Bryan Poyser's film Lovers of Hate, and her 1997 film The Slow Business of Going won a Texas Filmmakers Production Fund grant in 1997. Dogtooth played SXSW in 2010.
• True Grit: 10 nominations including Best Picture and Directing -- This Western was partially shot in Austin, as well as in nearby Granger. In addition, co-director Joel Coen attended grad school at The University of Texas at Austin (after which he and Ethan Coen shot Blood Simple in Austin). (Mike's review)

The Austin Film Critics Association announced its 2010 awards on Wednesday. It's hard for me to write this up as a straight news story since I'm a voting member, and I got to pick some of these awards -- Jenn is a member too this year. I'm happy to say that the movie that won Best Film is currently my favorite of the year: Black Swan. The movie also was awarded Best Director (Darren Aronofsky), Best Actress for Natalie Portman, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

Another pleasant surprise is that the Best Austin Film award went to an indie documentary: Winnebago Man, which first played Austin at SXSW 2009. Director Ben Steinbauer and producer Joel Heller are both Austinites. The doc about Jack Rebney won the award against some tough competition this year. I liked this film very much when I saw it at Alamo Drafthouse this summer; you can read more about it in Don's review. (It's now on DVD.)

The full list of awards is after the jump. AFCA also decided to give a special award this year to a TV show -- the Austin-shot series Friday Night Lights. True Grit was also partially shot in town as well as parts of Central Texas, and its star Hailee Steinfeld won Best Supporting Actress. I'm also pleased that overall, this year's award recipients are from a relatively eclectic list of movies, from The King's Speech to TRON: Legacy to Exit Through the Gift Shop. Now, can we get Banksy to show up at an awards ceremony?

Austin Film Festival has announced its winners today, and with no further ado, here they are: 

• Best Narrative Feature: Adios Mundo Cruel – Writers: Jack Zagha Kababie, Enrique Chmelnik
• Narrative Feature Special Jury Mention: Dog Sweat – Writers: Maryam Azadi, Hossein Keshavarz
• Best Documentary Feature: Louder Than a Bomb - Directors: Greg Jacobs, Jon Siskel
• Best Narrative Short: Katrina’s Son - Writer: Ya’Ke
• Narrative Short Special Jury Mention: The Six Dollar Fifty Man - Writers: Louis Southerland
• Best Documentary Short:  Birthright – Director: Sean Mullens
• Best Animated Short: The Lost Thing - Director: Shaun Tan
• Best Narrative Student Short: Down in Number 5 - Writer: Kim Spurlock

The Festival is accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which means the award-winning narrative short and narrative student short films are also eligible for an Academy Award, so try to see them again in their encore screenings, and you just might have bragging rights to say "I saw it when it played AFF."

Jenn already covered the list of this year's Fantastic Fest Award winners in her Fantastic Fest: Day 5 Dispatch, so I'll just share the highlights through photos. And like Jette mentioned in her earlier post, words are hard to put together when you average five films a day and a 4 am bedtime.

The audience award winner of Fantastic Fest 2010 was Bedevilled, with director Jang Cheol-so and Producer Han Man Taeg (seen above). Bedevilled is primarily a horror film, but the story is a blend of dark humor, drama and suspense. Actress Ji Sung-won took the Best Acress award for the AMD and Dell "Next Wave" Spotlight Competition for her role as Hae-won Chung, a young woman with a bad attitude living in Seoul. She's identified as a murder witness, but she doesn’t want to cooperate with the investigation. An involuntary vacation leads to even more trouble.

The Texas Filmmakers Production Fund (TFPF) recipients for 2010 have just been announced, and without even looking anything up, I can spot a number of Austin filmmakers among the lucky winners this year. Twenty-four projects received a total of $104,000 in cash, film stock and services. Selected filmmakers and projects are from all over the state of Texas, but it looks like more than half have ties to Austin this year.

One great benefit about the TFPF announcement for Austin film lovers is that it's a sneak peek into the projects that some local filmmakers have been working on. Hopefully we'll see some of the following movies in 2011 or beyond ... although one is actually screening in Austin tonight, and another will screen here (at least in part) within the month.

The largest single grant, $9,000, went to Austin artist and photographer Patrick Xavier Bresnan (Otis Ike) for post-production costs on Vietnam Appreciation Day, a documentary feature.

Chris Eska's feature August Evening won an Independent Spirit Award in 2008. Now Eska has received a $7,000 TFPF award for production on September Morning, a Western set during the Civil War about a teenage boy sent to retrieve a wanted man.

Former Austinite (he just left us for Chicago) Kyle Henry received $7,000 for post-production on Fourplay, the collection of four short films about sexual adventures in different U.S. cities. The first short, San Francisco, premiered at Outfest earlier this year and will be playing in Austin as part of aGLIFF in a couple of weeks.

Bob Byington also got a $7,000 grant for production costs on a narrative feature film called Seven Chinese Brothers. Byington's previous films, Harmony and Me and [RSO] Registered Sex Offender, have just become available on Netflix Watch Instantly.

I don't envy the judges of this year's second annual Lights. Camera. Help. Film Festival, which ran from last Thursday through Saturday. After viewing so many great non-profit and cause-driven films and PSAs representing worthy causes, I would have had a difficult time picking the best. Three winners for feature-length, short-form, and PSA films were selected from the pool of 33 finalists. The winners will receive the proceeds from this year's festival, which includes any donations made on the website during the festival season.

The feature winner, Including Samuel, portrays a family’s hopes and struggles as they engage their child Samuel (seen above with his brother Isaiah), who suffers from cerebral palsy. Although Samuel is the main subject, his father, filmmaker Dan Habib, delivers a well-balanced film by also documenting the experiences of four other individuals with disabilities. Alana Malfy, a high-school student, is part of Beyond Access, a University of New Hampshire pilot project working with public schools to fully include students who experience the most significant disabilities. Malfy benefits from the program but she also faces social challenges that daily test the patience and understanding of classmates and teachers.

I know I've mentioned before (possibly to the point of causing you to roll your eyes) that my favorite Austin red-carpet event every year is the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards. The only drawback to the evening is that it's the night before SXSW, so I get sucked up into this whirlwind of festival-tude before I can show you all the cool pictures I took.

This year, for the tenth annual awards, I covered the red carpet portion of the evening and Debbie Cerda took over for the actual awards ceremony. I admit I missed getting to watch the ceremony, which I enjoy, although I get exhausted from all the standing and kneeling and photography work by the end of the night. Someday maybe I'll get a seat at one of the tables. I'd probably have to dress up then, though. One advantage of working as press is that I get to wear sneakers.

I wrote about the evening for Cinematical, and that article includes a nice photo gallery of nationally recognizable celebrities, as well as excellent embedded videos from other media sites. You might want to check that out first. But I still have some photos left, especially of familiar Austin faces, so I thought I'd share a few of my favorites. Off we go.

The SXSW Film Festival announced more 2010 audience awards today in the Spotlight Premieres, Emerging Visions, Lone Star States, 24 Beats Per Second and Midnighters categories. One Austin-shot film and one Houston film were among the winners.

The juried awards were announced Tuesday night, but these accolades are from the audiences. With 134 feature-length films, these are the ones audiences really went wild for. So without further ado...

SPOTLIGHT PREMIERES
Winner: Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission (listen to Debbie's interview with Garriott)
Director: Mike Woolf (of Austin's Beef and Pie Productions)

LONE STAR STATES
Winner: Thunder Soul (pictured above)
Director: Mark Landsman