Santa Fe Film Festival Unveils 2005 Award Winners

The Israeli-made feature THE SYRIAN BRIDE has snagged the Best of the Fest Award at the sixth annual Santa Fe Film Festival.

THE SYRIAN BRIDE, by veteran director Eran Riklis, offers insights into the clash of cultures in the checkerboard Golan Heights bordering Israel and Syria . Clara Khoury plays a Druze woman from the disputed territory facing separation from her family if she agrees to an arranged marriage with a Syrian television star.

The Santa Fe Film Festival announced its full slate of 10 Milagro prizewinners in a ceremony Saturday night at the historic Scottish Rite Temple.

The festival also bestowed Luminaria Awards for lifetime achievement upon screenwriting collaborators Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN), Russian filmmaker Pavel Chukhraj (Oscar nominated in 1998 for THE THIEF), Mississippi-based music documentarian Robert Mugge, and the versatile L.M. Kit Carson, producer of BOTTLE ROCKET, screenwriter of PARIS, TEXAS and star of DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY, often considered the first mockumentary.

The Milagro for Independent Spirit went to Arthur Allan Seidelman's THE SISTERS, a richly shaded contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekhov's THREE SISTERS starring Maria Bello, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris O'Donnell and Rip Torn.

Mich è le Oyahon's COWBOY DEL AMOR took home the Milagro for Best Documentary. The subject of the doc, Ivan Thompson, who bills himself as the “Cowboy Cupid,” accepted the prize on Ohayon's behalf. Thompson runs a matchmaking service pairing love-starved American men with potential mates from Mexico .

Cradling his sleeping daughter, FOUR LANE HIGHWAY writer-director Dylan McCormick collected Santa Fe 's Audience Award. McCormick's tale introduces an adrift college student struggling to establish a separate identity outside the long shadow cast by his father, a famous novelist. Lead Greer Goodman previously appeared in the indie hit THE TAO OF STEVE, set in Santa Fe .

Serik Aprymov, a towering figure in the Kazakh New Wave, received a cash prize of $5,000 along with the Milagro for Best Indigenous Film for THE HUNTER. It's the story of a hunter on the vast steppes of Asia who becomes mentor to a young boy as a debt of gratitude owed to the boy's mother. National Geographic 's All Roads Film Project and the Santa Fe Film Festival jointly sponsored the prize.

An initiative supporting films by and about indigenous and minority cultures around the world, All Roads also takes its traveling festival to Los Angeles and Washington , D.C. , as well as to Canada and New Zealand . Plans call for a major expansion of All Roads' Santa Fe presence in 2006.

Other Milagro award winners:

• Youssef Delara's ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, which lays out the ties between recent and long-established Hispanic residents in Los Angeles , Best Latino Film.

• Monty Lapica's SELF MEDICATED, the gritty saga of a teen rebel forced to confront a nasty drug habit and mend a deeply strained relationship with his mother, Best of the Southwest.

• Laura Richard's BREACHED, about a pregnant Mexican woman determined that her child be born in the United States , Best Short.

• A.G. Vermouth's BALLOONHAT, the whimsical profile of a globetrotting balloon-twister, Best Creative Spirit.

• And Stephen Rose's SOUVENIR, a low-fi exercise in magic and myth, Best Animation.

The festival issued one final prize this season, a screenwriting award to Mari Marchbanks of Austin , Texas , for her debut feature FALL FROM GRACE. She lands a scholarship to the 2006 Santa Fe Screenwriting Conference.

All told, this year's edition of the Santa Fe Film Festival showcased about 220 works from nearly 40 nations. The five-day festival ran from Dec. 7-11, presenting films in 11 different venues and attracting 6,000-plus patrons.

Organizers anchored the festival with Ang Lee's BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN as the centerpiece gala, opening with Stephen Frears' MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, closing with Tommy Lee Jones' THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA, and reserving keynote slots for Roger Donaldson's THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN and Steven Soderbergh's BUBBLE.

Special guests included character actor Ernie Hudson, seizing upon a rare opportunity to assay a lead role in HALFWAY DECENT, and Mark and Michael Polish, the indie wunderkinds behind TWIN FALLS IDAHO and co-authors of the new book THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING: AN INSIDER'S GUIDE TO WORKING OUTSIDE HOLLYWOOD. Ali MacGraw, Wes Studi and Valentin DeVargas served as celebrity presenters for the awards ceremony, sharing the spotlight with screenwriters Danny Rubin and Kirk Ellis.