This year's Sundance Film Festival closed on Sunday with independent movies facing an uncertain future. As audiences decline and the economic pinch is increasingly felt, the indie sector is bracing itself for tough times. However, on-screen offerings at the Utah-based event painted a far brighter picture; one that showed smaller-scale filmmaking to still be in strong creative shape. At an awards ceremony held in Park City on Saturday night, the grand jury's US drama prize went to Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire - a moving film about the hardscrabble life of a Harlem teenager - and its documentary prize to We Live in Public, a cautionary tale of the rise and fall of an internet pioneer. Meanwhile, the documentary Afghan Star, which turns its lens on a television singing competition for young girls in Kabul, walked away with the audience award for world cinema documentary, and the filmmaker, Havana Marking, took the world cinema documentary prize for directing. Political films, always a Sundance staple, were less in evidence than on previous programmes. However, Burma VJ by Anders Ostergaard was a truly extraordinary entry. The film won the world cinema documentary prize for editing, thanks to its powerful use of smuggled, secretly shot footage of the 2007 uprising against the Burmese military dictatorship. Comedy also had its place, with one film in particular claiming a heap of praise. In the Loop is a feature-length companion piece to the British director and humourist Armando Iannucci's acclaimed TV series The Thick of It. Bitingly satirical, it follows the career of the gaffe-prone new minister for international development (played by Tom Hollander) against the backdrop of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It also features renowned actors including Gina McKee, James Gandolfini and Peter Capaldi. Environmental firms were also well represented, particularly by Earth Days. This closing-night documentary by Robert Stone traced the history of the US environmental movement and the impact of Ronald Reagan's administration on environmental policy. "We've lost 30 years," says one scientist as he discusses America's failure to control air pollution, climate change and the stress on resources from exponential growth. Thought-provoking, indeed. Dirt! The Movie, by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow, is a fascinating documentary that celebrates the soil that covers our planet, while Crude, a documentary by Joe Berlinger, examines the lengthy lawsuit between the Chevron Corporation and the indigenous people of the Amazon region over the pollution of natural water supplies. Experts supporting the plaintiffs say that more oil has been dumped in the region than was spilt in 1989's Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska. Chevron denies all responsibility. However, Crude shows a stopgap solution to the decades-long crisis being found when Trudi Styler, the wife of the pop star Sting, visits and helps to arrange clean drinking water for many families. Sting's visit to Sundance was a reminder that a cause (and a film) can be helped by the right celebrity endorsements. On that note, Sundance is always gridlocked with agents and producers in search of the next generation of stars. Even if many of the films on show are too small and/or too serious to make big money, Hollywood is never far away in its pursuit of new talent. A case in point is Push, directed by Lee Daniels and adapted from the 1996 novel by the African-American writer Sapphire. The lead role of Precious Jones, an illiterate teenager expecting her second child, is played by young Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, whose mother is ably acted by the comedian Mo'Nique. It's a grim story of abuse and as gritty as can be. Mo'Nique, who won a special jury prize for acting, makes a dislikeable character utterly believable. Get ready to see much more of these two actresses. Anna Chlumsky is another star from whom who we can expect great things. Seen at Sundance as part of In the Loop's manic ensemble cast, she plays young Liza Ward, a US State Department worker who authors a research paper that argues against going to war in the Middle East. Naturally, her ideas are appropriated by her boss at key meetings, and the paper becomes a lightning rod in battles between pro-war and anti-war factions in Washington. Chlumsky has an impeccable sense of place and a flair for improvisation that makes her a crucial part of every scene that she features in. Another British film, An Education, adapted by the novelist Nick Hornby from an autobiographical essay by the writer Lynn Barber about falling for an older con man, introduced Carey Mulligan to Sundance. In this 1960s-set film, which won the audience prize for world cinema drama, the actress plays Jenny, a confident but easily swayed girl who is sidetracked by love from a future at Oxford University. Mulligan holds her own in a cast including Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson and Peter Sarsgaard. Her subtle acting and delicate beauty call to mind Audrey Hepburn. Not a bad start. (Mulligan was also in another Sundance film, The Greatest, with Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon, as the girlfriend of a young man killed in a car accident.) Another newcomer travelled to Sundance from the Middle East in Amreeka, written and directed by Cherien Dabis. The young Palestinian actor Melkar Muallem plays Fadi, the son of Muna (Nisreen Faour), who leaves her native Bethlehem for a small town in Illinois. Muallem turns in a touching portrait of one character's struggle with the immigration experience as an angry boy, mocked by his new schoolmates and determined to avenge his mother's humiliation by local bullies. Just as emerging acting talent has been nurtured by Sundance, so has music as part of the independent film experience. This year the festival's role has been archaeological, digging into music history. In the documentary competition, When You're Strange, by Tom DiCillo (until now a director of comedies), turned archive footage of The Doors into a history of the influential California rock group. The charismatic singer, Jim Morrison, formed the band while a film student at UCLA and one of his friends, Paul Ferrara, accompanied the group with his camera, shooting everything. Performance footage of The Doors, which has never been shown before, is thrilling, and DiCillo bookends his documentary with sections from Morrison's own 1969 film, HWY: An American Pastoral, also shot by Ferrara. This Might Get Loud, by Davis Guggenheim, the director of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's public warning about global warming, offered a study of the electric guitar by musicians from three generations: Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2, and Jack White of The Raconteurs. All three can talk as well as they play and the film interweaves musical autobiographies with stirring performance clips. Music's ability to capture the mood of an era comes through in Adventureland, by Greg Mottola (Superbad), a fictional look back at a summer working in a Pittsburgh amusement park in 1987. Jesse Eisenberg plays a high-school graduate whose parents can't afford to send him to Europe. Instead, he spends his time at his job, running games for children and their parents, and falling in love to a soundtrack of 1980s hits. While Adventureland couldn't be more commercial, Sundance likes to see itself as a protected space, where risk can be rewarded. One example where this is true is Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes's first feature film, in which the actor Paul Giamatti plays a character (of the same name) who sells his soul to unburden himself of life's frustrations. Barthes describes herself as an admirer of Woody Allen and says that this movie came to her via Allen in a dream. In fact, the Faustian bargain at the core of Cold Souls, signed in a medical office specialising in "soul storage", is a moment that could have come straight out of Allen's movie Sleeper. Wondrously shot by Andrij Parekh, Barthes's attempt to add 21st-century edge to the legend of Faust may not be entirely consistent, but it represents an auspicious beginning all the same. We Live in Public also deals with another kind of soul-selling, telling the story of Josh Harris - a man who used the internet to make a fortune and turn his own vision of the future into reality, creating an underground bunker in New York City, where a group of people lived together for 30 days over the millennium, their every moment filmed and broadcast on the web. Harris, once called the new Andy Warhol, tells us that people want their 15 minutes of fame every day. Of course, the novelty sours and the project is shut down, but then he pays a girlfriend to join him while cameras film their lives together in a new loft. Predictably, it isn't long before they cannot bear the sight of each other. At a Sundance screening with the film's director, Ondi Timoner, Harris was back in the US after taking time off in a village in Ethiopia, and said that he plans to go to work for Microsoft. Getting stories such as We Live in Public made and distributed is more of a struggle than ever. Fewer screens in the US show independent films, and the money to make films and promote them is scarce. One film found a novel solution to the exposure dilemma, though: a full-blown fist-fight. After Dirt! The Movie screened last Wednesday, an overeager representative of the film, Jeff Dowd, confronted the Variety critic John Anderson, who had said that he didn't care for it. After some discussion Anderson rose from his breakfast table and punched Dowd. No charges have been filed, but the internet can't let the story go. Nor can Dirt's publicists. "They should be paying me," Anderson has reportedly said.
