A 'Sterling' Night For Documentaries

AFI Hosts the Silverdocs Awards

It was not your typical awards ceremony. The presenters had no teleprompter (one speaker bungled a film title and then joked, "It's a remix!"). A Chinese director took the stage without his interpreter (his earnest speech drew the longest applause). And the winner of the prize for best U.S. feature gave his acceptance speech in his underwear (although to be fair, he wasn't in the room).

In Los Angeles for a film festival, Scott Hamilton Kennedy couldn't make it Saturday night to the Silverdocs awards show at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. Early Saturday morning, he'd read an e-mail from programmers with news that he'd won the feature award for his documentary "The Garden," about a 14-acre community farm in South Central Los Angeles. threatened by warehouse developers.

So Kennedy, 43, drafted an acceptance in his skivvies that was read aloud on a black stage against a bright blue screen, as presenters distributed shiny crystal orb trophies, called Sterlings, and $81,500 in combined cash prizes.

The other winners got the good news live from the stage. "The English Surgeon" took the world feature award for its story of a Londoner in Ukraine performing brain surgery in a retrograde clinic. The prize for best short went to "What Would the Drop Know About That?," a 13-minute German film about custodial workers of the Reichstag.

The Sterlings (given the name because the documentary competition takes place in Silver Spring) are awarded by independent juries of filmmakers. The sixth Silverdocs festival, co-sponsored by the American Film Institute and Discovery Channel, screened 108 films from 63 countries.

Geoffrey Smith, 49, the director of "Surgeon," ascended the stage in the show's last minute; his foreign category was last, but because two of his friends had already won trophies at the event, "that took the edge off," he said.

It was only Smith's third festival in his 16 years of making documentaries for British television. While he waited for his category, he pored over the judging panel, which included Steve James, director of the Oscar-nominated "Hoop Dreams."

"They all seemed like really lovely people," he said of the judges, "people who have a sort of affinity with my type of film." He added, however: "It's a very fickle, whimsical business. It's unwise to go in with high expectations."

Attendance at the eight-day festival, which concludes today, will exceed 21,000, spokeswoman Jody Arlington said. Votes for the audience awards, both feature and short, were tabulated after press time last night; the winning films will be screened again today.

Runners-up for the Sterlings included "The Red Race," about a brutal Shanghai gymnastic school, and "Trouble the Water," about Hurricane Katrina. "Ground Floor Right" and "One Day" received honorable mention.

Other non-Sterling awards were given to "Throw Down Your Heart," "The Order of Myths," "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," "Kassim the Dream," "Forbidden Lie$" and "The Elephant in the Living Room."

Smith said there's no longer a market for documentaries on British TV, but stories still abound, awaiting a documenter and a festival such as this. "If I told you I had written a script about an English brain surgeon using a Bosch handyman drill to operate on a man who's awake, fully conscious, in the KGB hospital, you'd think I had too many drugs," he said, in nearly one full breath. "But that's literally the truth we see in the film."