Names and faces
■ The Korean-American family drama Minari, Lee Isaac Chung’s tender autobiographical tale about his upbringing in rural Arkansas, won two top honors at the Sundance Film Festival. Awards for the annual festival for independent film were handed out Saturday night in Park City, Utah. Minari, starring Steven Yeun, was arguably the biggest critical sensation at Sundance, with the immigrant drama set in 1980s Arkansas earning raves. Chung grew up on a farm near Lincoln. The film is produced by Plan B Productions, with Brad Pitt as an executive producer; A24 will release it later this year. The film snagged the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize and the dramatic audience award, voted on by festival audiences, at Sundance. The top documentary prize went to Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a portrait of the annual mock-government competition held in Texas with politically ambitious 17-year-old boys. Crip Camp, a history of the disability-rights movement as emanating from a summer camp in upstate New York, took the audience award for documentary. Nicole Newnham and Jim Lebrecht’s film is a Netflix release backed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. Radha Blank won best director in the dramatic competition for her debut The 40-Year-Old Version. The jury also gave special awards to Josephine Decker for her Shirley Jackson drama Shirley, for auteur filmmaking; and Eliza Hittman for her teen abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, for neorealism.
■ Tulane University has acquired the complete archives of best-selling author
Anne Rice, who was born and raised in New Orleans and whose books, including Interview with a Vampire, often draw inspiration from her hometown. The collection was a gift from Stuart Rose and the Stuart Rose Family Foundation to the university’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, the university said in a statement. “That Tulane has provided a home for my papers is exciting and comforting,” Rice said in the statement. “All my novels — in a career spanning more than 40 years — have been profoundly influenced by the history and beauty of New Orleans, and by its unique ambience in which my imagination flourished even in early childhood.” Rice has written 30 novels. New Orleans has played a central role in much of her fiction. Interview with a Vampire was her first novel when it was published in 1976 and is set in the city’s French Quarter. The book was later turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Another novel called Feast of All Saints, was about free people of color in antebellum New Orleans. The collection at Tulane will consist of manuscripts of most of her published works, some unpublished short stories, journals, screenplays, personal artifacts and correspondence from family, friends and fans.