Going to Extremes: Challenging films win in both the dramatic and documentary categories at Sundance.

Powered by a fierce, compelling
performance by Ryan Gosling, the
smart, provocative Believer was an
unexpected but popular choice for the
top prize. Written as well as directed
by (Henry) Bean and based on a true story
that’s been on his mind for 25 years,
this is an intensely verbal and discomforting character study about a young
Orthodox Jew who becomes a violent neo-Nazi only to find that it as difficult to live
without his Judaism as it is to live with it.

“The only reason I was willing to submit this film to Sundance was because I
thought we’d never get in,” Bean said in accepting the award Saturday night. “To
have won something is incredible.”

The intimate, moving Southern Comfort, which filmmaker (Kate) Davis shot on a
digital camera, often with herself as her only crew, involves us in the life of Robert
Eads, a 52-year-old female-to-male transsexual who, his impeccably masculine
presence notwithstanding, is both dying of ovarian cancer and falling in love with
a male-to-female transsexual named Lola Cola.
A truly mind-bending film, disorienting in the best possible way, Southern
Comfort not only gives us a caring, accepting look at a rarely examined world, it
also expands our sense of what human sexuality can encompass. “Being a man
or being a woman has nothing to do with your genitalia,” Eads says. “It’s what’s in
your mind or in your heart.” LA Times