A Dartmouth alumnus won top-honors at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah over the weekend for the film he directed, co-wrote and co-produced.
Jonathan Nossiter '84 was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for the film "Sunday," a film which also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. The Grand Jury Prize is the top-honor at the Sundance Festival.
The film is about a struggling actress who mistakes a homeless man for an acclaimed film director. The New York Times called Nossiter's film "a quiet, delicately balanced drama about two people who meet oddly and go on to weave a web of shared illusions."
A film by another Dartmouth graduate, Julie Davis '90 was also featured at the Sundance Festival. Her film "I Love You, Don't Touch Me" was "one of the hot movies at Sundance," according to the New York Times. The Times compared Davis to Woody Allen.
Hopkins Center Film Director Bill Pence said both Nossiter and Davis were active members of the Dartmouth Film Society as undergraduates.
"I remember [Nossiter] as very serious about film," Pence said. "He would be attending the movies with the subtitles, not 'Independence Day.'"
Pence said this is the second year in a row Dartmouth alumni have been featured at Sundance. Last year Donna Bascom '73 won a prize for her film "Welcome to the Dollhouse."
Bascom brought her film to Dartmouth a few weeks after the festival, and Pence said he will try to convince Nossiter and Davis to do the same.
The Sundance Film Festival is "a major platform for new American film directors and producers," Pence said.
But he said there is no guarantee that acclaim at the festival will translate to favorable reception at the box office. He said judgest at the Academy Awards are not like the juries at film festivals, who often prefer more "odd" films.
Classics Professor Edward Bradley said he has been in regular and close contact with Nossiter since he graduated in 1984.
He said Nossiter was a Classics major and a Senior Fellow at Dartmouth, and his Senior Fellow project involved producing a film adaptation of "Prometheus Bound" by the Greek playwright Aeschylus.
"It was an interesting film, an important part of which he filmed at Alumni Stadium and in Ruggles Mine in Grafton," Bradley said.
Bradley said he read the script for "Sunday" and "found it a very moving story with a good deal of somber humor."
According to Bradley, Nossiter is currently working on writing a script loosely based on a novel called "Cosmos" by a Czech writer.
Nossiter and Davis were unavailable for comment.
