(MENAFN- Arab Times) LOS ANGELES March 22 (RTRS): Grand jury prize recipient 'Krisha' and 'Hello My Name Is Doris' are among the winners of this year's SXSW Film Festival Audience Awards announced on Saturday. While director Trey Edward Shults' family drama 'Krisha' won its second major prize of the festival in the narrative feature competition fest hit 'Hello My Name Is Doris' starring Sally Field nabbed the prize in the headliners category. Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber's hard-hitting doc 'Peace Officer' was recognized in the documentary feature competition following its documentary grand jury prize win.
Other categories include narrative spotlight documentary spotlight visions and midnighters. The 22nd annual SXSW Film Festival screened over 150 feature films including 102 world premieres 14 North American premieres and 11 US premieres with 62 first-time directors. Here's the complete list of audience award winners: Narrative Feature Competition Audience Award Winner: Krisha Director: Trey Edward Shults Documentary Feature Competition Audience Award Winner: Peace Officer Directors: Scott Christopherson Brad Barber Headliners Audience Award Winner: Hello My Name is Doris Director: Michael Showalter Narrative Spotlight Audience Award Winner: The Little Death Director: Josh Lawson Documentary Spotlight Audience Award Winner: A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story Director: Sara Hirsh Bordo Visions Audience Award Winner: Uncle Kent 2 Director: Todd Rohal Midnighters Audience Award Winner: Turbo Kid Director: RKSS Collective Episodic Audience Award Winner: Mr. Robot Creator/Executive Producer: Sam Esmail Director: Niels Arden Oplev 24 Beats Per Second Audience Award Winner: Landfill Harmonic Directors: Brad Allgood Graham Townsley Sxglobal Audience Award Winner: Kings of Nowhere Director: Betzabe Garcia Festival Favorites Audience Award Winner: The Look of Silence Director: Joshua Oppenheimer SXSW Film Design Awards Excellence in Poster Design Audience Award Winner: Pink Grapefruit Designer: Simon Dargan for Musta Lunta Excellence in Title Design Audience Award Winner: The Fitzroy Designers: Chris Tozer Marko Anstice Think of 'Kahlil Gibran's ' as a gift: a work of essential spiritual enlightenment elegantly interpreted by nine of the world's leading independent animators all tied up and wrapped in a family-friendly bow by 'The Lion King' director Roger Allers. A longtime passion project for producer Salma Hayek-Pinault Lebanese philosopher-poet Gibran's beloved guide to life death love art and so forth doesn't naturally lend itself to bigscreen interpretation and at first the pic's framing device seems too silly for such soulful subject matter but the freshly scripted wraparound doesn't shy away from grown-up concerns while potentially broadening the book's reach to younger audiences as well. Although Hayek had hoped to land a higher-profile distrib she will probably have better luck with the toon champs at GKids whose white-glove release efforts have netted six Oscar nominations so far. In Gibran's book after spending a dozen years in a foreign land a wise teacher offers 26 sermons on subjects essential to leading a fulfilled and meaningful existence then sets sail for his home country a format rich with enlightenment but dangerously thin on dramatic incident. Different For the film Hayek selected eight of the most beloved chapters and delegated each to a different toon talent inviting the various artists to find interpret Gibran's sentiments according to their distinctive visual styles. In order to flesh out the narrative connecting these vignettes director Allers devised a more elaborate backstory inventing a mischievous young girl whose name Almitra he borrows from the book. The feisty young lady seldom speaks (when she does it's 'Annie' star Quvenzhane Wallis who delivers Almitra's lines) but runs around the town of Orphalese causing havoc while her harried mother (Hayek) tends to the character Mustafa (Liam Neeson). For dramatic purposes Mustafa has been promoted to a dangerous dissident: Kept under house arrest he's perceived as a threat to the local government. The authorities announce their intentions to send him home but appear to have more sinister plans in store and Mustafa's lessons take on a new importance: quite possibly the final words of a condemned man. That's a heavily politicized parable within which to present teachings that don't feel all that subversive to begin with especially for younger audiences who might not be comfortable with the idea that some ideas can be dangerous enough to carry death sentences although the tactic elevates Mustafa's character to a sort of martyr making every word count not that his beautiful aphorisms need the help thanks to the already intoxicating combination of Neeson's mellifluous delivery and Gabriel Yared's score. If only Allers' in-between portions were as engaging as Mustafa's speeches. As fruit carts spill and opinionated seagulls take aim at authority figures both the action and animation of the main story leave something to be desired at least in contrast with the calming artistic interludes that break up such buffoonery. Designed to mimic the look of classic hand-drawn cartoons Allers' scenes actually seem to have been achieved through some sort of not-yet-perfected rotoscope process except that instead of tracing live-action footage (the way Disney made Snow White dance so realistically 77 years earlier) his crew flattens computer-animated models into 2D-style characters with sometimes awkward results: a too-fluid sense of movement coupled with a split-second delay as the animation lags ever so slightly (at least the backgrounds appear lovingly homemade). Chalk that up as a small technical quibble or perhaps a necessary concession given the challenge of producing hand-drawn animation in the new digital era although several of the other contributors seem determined to keep the bespoke tradition alive. For example the astoundingly prolific Bill Plympton still sketches every frame by hand interpreting 'On Eating & Drinking' with colored pencil (but none of his usual humor alas). Emirati animator Mohammed Saeed Harib stunningly combines watercolor elements for 'On Good & Evil's' nature-centric montage while award-winning Italian twins Paul and Gaetan Brizzi (who worked for Disney on the studio's final non-CG toons including the Firebird sequence from 'Fantasia 2000') not only brought old-school drawing skills to the final chapter 'On Death' but storyboarded all of Allers' material as well. 'Work is love made visible' Mustafa preaches in 'The Film' most awe-inspiring segment 'On Work.' The sequence overseen by clay-painting pioneer Joan Gratz (an Oscar winner for her short 'Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase') proves as visually mesmerizing as it is profound: Hands bodies and the cosmos themselves swirl and transform before our eyes as Neeson shares Gibran's insights on labor and the creative impulse itself. Though inevitably uneven in places the film undeniably reflects this idea of a project boosted by the passion of all who participated. For Hayek whose star persona is so indelibly linked to her Mexican heritage this project represents an long-overdue chance to share her lesser-known Lebanese background (on her father's side). As producer she not only enabled the first Arabic character in her filmography but also hand-selected an international roster of independent animators to with whom to collaborate choosing artists who've maintained their independence in a medium that tends to merchandize everything. That's where Allers proves such an important collaborator steering Gibran's esotericism back toward the mainstream and giving the project a form that feels orderly and unified.
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