Deaf-family story ‘CODA’ and concert film ‘Summer of Soul’ are multiple award winners at Sundance

Movies about music — one in which a hearing daughter of deaf parents discovers her singing voice, the other a celebration of an unjustly forgotten concert event — were the big winners at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s awards ceremony Tuesday night.

“CODA,” director Siân Heder’s warm-hearted tale of a Massachusetts fishing family whose daughter (Emilia Jones) is her deaf family’s translator, won four awards — a record for a Sundance film. It won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic competition, and the jury also gave the Directing Award to Heder and a special prize to the ensemble cast.

[Read more: Here are The Tribune’s unofficial picks for the best of Sundance]

“I’m handless!” signed deaf actor Troy Kotsur in the video acceptance speech after “CODA” won the Audience Award. Kotsur and Oscar winner Marlee Matlin play the parents of Jones’ character. The awards ceremony, like most of the festival, was streamed online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This movie was just an incredible experience to make,” Heder said when the Grand Jury Prize was announced. “Now the response from everybody was just like …” She finished the sentence by signing an explosion of joy.

“CODA” had already won a different prize earlier in the festival: a distribution deal, reportedly for a record $25 million, from AppleTV+. The movie should debut on the streaming service later this year.

In the U.S. Documentary competition, the concert film “Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” also won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award.

Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, known as the bandleader of The Roots, assembled long-forgotten videotaped footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of concerts — the same summer as Woodstock — featuring Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, the Staples Singers and more.

“I didn’t even know this was a contest, yo,” Thompson said in one of his acceptance videos. In the other, he added, “This is beyond dreams coming true. … My purpose and my goal was to just not drop the ball, and make my people proud of me.”

Another multiple winner was the Kosovo-made drama “Hive,” about a woman (Yllka Gashi) facing down the patriarchy as she starts a small business. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary competition, and the Directing Prize for Blerta Basholli.

In the World Cinema Documentary competition, the animated story “Flee” — which tells of an Afghan refugee’s journey to a new life in Denmark — won the Grand Jury Prize. It received a distribution deal from Neon Films, and will be released in the United States with an English-language cast including Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”).

The Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary competition went to the Indian film “Writing With Fire,” which follows women in India’s low-caste Dalit community starting their own newspaper. The jury also gave the film’s directors, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, a special prize for “impact for change.”

One of the most moving acceptance speeches was delivered by veteran character actor Clifton Collins Jr., who received a special jury prize for acting for his leading role in director Clint Bentley’s drama “Jockey.” Collins plays an aging horse racer who thinks he might have one last winning season in him.

“This is all beyond overwhelming, but my gratitude’s even bigger than that feeling,” Collins said. “That tells me the one thing that connects us all — the ability to feel, to have compassion and empathy — transcends race, creed and color. I think that’s the very essence of what we do. We long to be remembered, and, more importantly, to affect, touch and inspire change, positive change.”

One of the stranger acceptance speeches came from Gregory Barnes, whose short film “The Touch of the Master’s Hand,” won the Short Film Jury’s prize for U.S. fiction. The film, based on Barnes’ experiences as a Latter-day Saint missionary and made with a mostly ex-LDS crew, centers on a young missionary making a shocking confession to his mission president.

Barnes shot his acceptance video outside the Latter-day Saint temple in Los Angeles, and ended his thanks with his version of a traditional LDS cheer: a “Hosanna shout,” waving a tissue in the air and intoning, “Hosanna! Hosanna! To God and the lamb!”

The winners announced Tuesday will stream on the festival’s digital platform one more time Wednesday, the seventh and final day of the shortened festival.