Movies about disenfranchised people in trouble took the top jury prizes at Sundance this year, testament once again to the constant gulf between audience favourites and jury picks. The Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. dramatic competition went to Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, about people smugglers working a reserve straddling the U.S./Canada border. The sister prize for best U.S. documentary went to Trouble The Water, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's harrowing portrait of one married couple in New Orleans' Ninth Ward surviving Hurricane Katrina.

On the audience side, the top dramatic prize went to Jonathan Levine's The Wackness, a coming-of-age story set in 1994 New York, about a small-time pot dealer's relationship with his shrink, played by Ben Kingsley. The Wackness split audiences at Sundance, but those who liked it -- young men, hiphop heads, fans of Igby Goes Down -- liked it a lot.

That a dramatic jury composed of Quentin Tarantino, Sandra Oh, Marcia Gay Harden, Mary Harron and Diego Luna gave the prize to a quiet, downbeat drama says much about what happens at Sundance. It's as if the hothouse pressure of buying and selling movies pushes the jurors outside into the fresh air. They're looking for something pure.

Complete list of Sundance 2008 Award Winners:

Grand Jury Prize: Documentary

Trouble The Water; directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic

Frozen River; directed by Courtney Hunt

World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary

Man on Wire; directed by James Marsh

World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic

King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen); directed by Jens Jonsson

Audience Award: Documentary

Fields of Fuel; directed by Josh Tickell

Audience Award: Dramatic

The Wackness; directed by Jonathan Levine

World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary

Man on Wire; directed by James Marsh

World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic

Captain Abu Raed; directed by Amin Matalqa

Directing Award: Documentary

Nanette Burstein for American Teen

Directing Award: Dramatic

Lance Hammer for Ballast

World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary

Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools (Durakovo: Le Village Des Fous)

World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic

Anna Melikyan for Mermaid (Rusalka)

World Cinema Screenwriting Award

Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J'ai Toujours Reve D'Etre Un Gangster)

World Cinema Documentary Editing Award

Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary

Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic

Lol Crawley for Ballast

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary

al Massad for Recycle

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic

Askild Vik Edvardsen for King of King Pong (Ping Pongkingen)

Documentary Editing Award

Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award

Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer

Special Jury Prizes

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic

Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules), directed by Ernesto Contreas

Special Jury Prize: Documentary

Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, directed by Lisa F. Jackson

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence

Anywhere, U.S.A., directed by Chusy Haney-Jardine

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast

Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke for Choke

Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking

My Olympic Summer, directed by Daniel Robin

Sikumi (On the Ice), directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean

Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking

Soft, directed by Simon Ellis

Alfred P. Sloan Prize

The Sleep Dealer; directed by Alex Rivera

U2 showed up for the launch of their 3D concert movie this weekend, with Al Gore as part of their entourage. The film is largely irrelevant at a spectacle like this, but the highlight for many in the audience was hearing Bono tell one guy to "fuck off" when he asked the wrong question during the Q&A. He asked if Bono would ever make a film with social relevance.

This report from an entertaining group of Texas alt-yahoos on the shuttle bus from Main Street down to the Yarrow cinema. They traded insults, they traded tips for doing Sundance, but mostly they traded critical reflections on Bruce LaBruce's new film, Otto, Or Up With Dead People.

"It was like gay zombie porn for the sake of gay zombie porn," one said.

"There was like some messages," the other countered, like "acceptance, we're all zombies, that shit.

"It was a porno! But not just butt-fucking. More like tear a hole in a dude's stomach, eat out his intestines, then fuck the fucking hole!"

"Dude."

Not much more to say, really. LaBruce once was a film critic, too. I don't know if he could do better.

Even the skiers are complaining about the cold. This morning it feels like -20 (adding the wind chill is automatic with me) and there are hard banks of icy snow crowding you on the sidewalk. There's a core of theatre staff here who come down from Toronto to work Sundance, outside, all day long. These people are my heroes.

Location matters when it comes to film festivals. The cold and thin mountain air pushes people together into condos, Mexican restaurants and the makeshift cinemas where a lot of the screenings happen. We're excited just to be warm.

On opening night it was all jeans, sweaters and pocket warmers as first Robert Redford then festival honcho Geoff Gilmore got up to point the way towards something new: new filmmakers, a new sense of humour in the films, and a new turn towards globalism in the overall selection, and even among the American directors in Competition here, several of whom are foreign born. Place matters.

And so Sundance opened with a film by a London-born director set in Belgium starring Irish actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. In Bruges, which opens in theatres next month, is a dark comedy about two gangsters sent to a postcard medieval town to hide out after a job went wrong. Writer-director Martin McDonagh got his start in the theatre, and gives this film sharp, sometimes hilarious dialogue and surprising emotion between Farrell and Gleeson's characters. But the real success here is the tone, which leans heavily on nighttime settings, a funhouse score and Farrell's looming eyebrows to concoct the feel of a dreamy farce. In Bruges is the first film I've seen in a long time that marries violence and comedy so blithely; it's as if the mid-90s are back already.

This same story wouldn't work in America in the current climate, but it works in Bruges, because it's an obscure Euro outpost that seems in the film to be set apart from the modern world. Place matters.

In fact Sundance's "Film Takes Place" theme this year seems especially apt. Before each film a mesmerizing loop plays on screen. A road stretches out in a continuous, slow travelling shot, with Park City's famous snow covered mountains rising up on either side and a mirror-image time-lapse froth of clouds and blue sky above. It's clearly a composite of images shot in different places and seasons, but it gives an overall impression of conjuring up a single fantasy space, some kind of space of reflection and endless promise. It creates some kind of new place to watch these movies, and this year, it works.

It may be the thin air, but people up here in the choking cold of Park City, Utah actually take buzz seriously. It's a tangible commodity, like pork bellies or money.

Last year at this festival, a John Cusak film about the slow implosion of an Iraq War widower had great buzz. The Weinstein Company bought Grace Is Gone for $4 million, then released in theatres to the echoing sound of only $37,000. Nobody wanted to see Cusack slumped over in a downer war movie that didn't even have any blood in it.

Dan Klores's buzz documentary Crazy Love suffered suffered a similar plunge when it came down from the mountain to real-world audiences. In fact, of last year's Sundance crop, there was only one film that went on to a combination of adoring audiences, universal critical acclaim and box office earnings of 50 times what it cost to make. That film was Once, the Irish busking romance (and my top film of 2007). At Sundance it had zero buzz. It was bought for a relatively paltry $150,000. It did $10 million.

The fact is it's hard to predict the future success of one-offs like Once or Napoleon Dynamite, which premiered here in 2004 to good response but nothing like the epoch-defining roar it came to take on.

The only recent film where buzz, money and reality all lined up was Little Miss Sunshine. Sundance audiences loved it -- true comedies are rare here -- and Fox Searchlight bought it for a fat $10 million. It went on to $100 million in ticket sales and four Academy Award nominations.

But Little Miss Sunshine is exactly what's wrong with Sundance these days. It came to Park City masquerading as a quirky independent film, but with Hollywood cashbox Steve Carrell in a starring roles, how indie could it be? Wrap the same movie in a big studio marketing campaign and launch it mid-summer and it begins to look like something from the Olsen sisters oeuvre.

But that's buzz for ya.

So instead of wondering whether Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind will top the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke, or whether Marianna Palka's Good Dick will match last year's Teeth, better to not feed the buzz machine. Nothing really starts until Martin McDonagh's In Bruges opens the festival tonight, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson playing two gangsters cooling their heels in a medieval Flemish town. Then there's a party, tongues will loosen and the buzz will flow.