Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, a drama about the challenges and taboos surrounding motherhood, was named the year’s best indie film at the Spirit Awards on Sunday.
Gyllenhaal — until now primarily known as an actress in films such as The Dark Knight and Secretary — also won prizes for best screenplay and best director, for her debut effort in both fields.
The Film Independent Spirit Awards honor low and mid-budget movies, and the glitzy gala held at Santa Monica beach near Los Angeles could provide a much-needed boost for smaller films like Gyllenhaal’s ahead of this month’s Oscars.
Photo: REUTERS
The Lost Daughter, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel, is in the running for three Academy Awards including best actress for Olivia Colman, who plays a mother estranged from her children and harboring guilt for her failings in raising them.
“My film is in an unusual language — it’s the language of the minds of women,” said Gyllenhaal, before dedicating her final prize for best feature to “women in film.”
While only films made for less than US$22.5 million can compete for Spirit Awards, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars turned out for the event, and streaming giant Netflix emerged as the day’s big winner with six awards.
Beyond the honors for The Lost Daughter, Netflix earned two prizes for 1920s race drama Passing, including best supporting actress for Ruth Negga, and one for South Korean smash hit series Squid Game.
Stars Kristen Stewart and Javier Bardem were among several who used the event to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Taylour Paige won best actress for her portrayal of a stripper who becomes embroiled with a prostitution scam in Zola, a black comedy based on a viral Twitter thread. Simon Rex — a former MTV host who began his career by appearing in adult films — won best actor for Red Rocket, about a washed-up porn star.
Rex said his career had been “in the toilet” before director Sean Baker approached him to make the tiny film, which sees him running naked down the streets of a small Texas town while wearing a prosthetic penis.
“Thank you so much for recognizing my fake penis,” joked Rex.
“This movie was made for US$1 million with a 10-person crew with no permits,” he added. “We were hiding from police. We were hiding from neighbors. I was running down the street butt-naked. If this doesn’t embody the spirit... of independent film, I don’t know what does.”
‘FREE THIS FILM’
The Spirit Awards are typically held the day before the Oscars, but this year were held three weeks prior, meaning voting for the season-concluding Academy Awards has not yet taken place.
Deaf actor Troy Kotsur cemented his Oscar frontrunner status by earning another best supporting actor prize for his role in CODA.
The film follows high school teen Ruby as she juggles her musical ambitions with her deaf family’s dependence on her to communicate with the “hearing” world.
Summer of Soul (...Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) — musician Questlove’s first movie about the huge “Black Woodstock” festival that took place in 1969 Harlem — won best documentary.
The film brings to light long-lost and never-before-seen footage of the star-studded concert, which was attended by 300,000 people and featured Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson.
Questlove — real name Ahmir Thompson — said it “took a village of people to free this film from its 50-year sentence sitting inside of a basement.”
Each year, the Spirit Awards gives the prestigious Robert Altman Award to a film’s director, casting director and cast.
Mass, a harrowing drama in which a school mass shooting victim’s parents sit down with the mother and father of the attacker in a bid to find closure, received the pre-announced honor.
The Oscars take place in Hollywood on March 27.
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
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