The 2011 Sundance Film Festival Awards went down tonight in Park City. While the biggest surprise was the volume of films acquired by distributor, in the end, the story was about excellence in independent film making. The big winner of the evening was the Drake Doremus-directed love story Like Crazy, which took the…

(Sharon Swart is assisting Deadline's Sundance coverage) Sundance has launched new directors' careers for decades, most famously Steven Soderbergh with his 1989 sex, lies, and videotape. In recent years, helmers including Ryan Fleck (2006's Half Nelson) and Cary Fukunaga (2009's Sin Nombre) broke through at the…

EXCLUSIVE: In its second Sundance deal today, Participant Media has acquired North American rights to Circumstance, a tale of forbidden love in Iran, written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz. Deal is worth mid to high six figures. The picture, which premiered Saturday, is Farsi language with English…

EXCLUSIVE: The Christmas holiday has so far made it difficult to rally a collective outcry from directors Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, who spoke out for Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi when he was first arrested. But two Iranian filmmakers who are debuting politically-charged films at next…