A poetic documentary about grunge rocker Kurt Cobain, a debut feature about a self-deluded poet who imagines he can take New York City by storm with a couple of poems, and a story about a woman trying to decide between her husband and an older man were the three films receiving the 29th Starz Denver Film Festival’s prizes Saturday night at the festival’s closing festivities.
Winners were announced before the closing night film, Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn.”
The Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature Film went to Czech director Jan Hrebejk’s “Beauty in Trouble.”
Today, the festival continues with a full day of movies, including showings of brothers Aaron and Adam Nee’s “The Last Romantic,” which won the Emerging Filmmakers Award and AJ Schnack’s “Kurt Cobain: About a Son,” winner of the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary.
Using audiotaped interviews that music journalist Michael Azerrad conducted with Nirvana frontman Cobain the year before his death in 1994, director Schnack creates an elegy worthy of Cobain. It’s a portrait of an artist in which the artist’s face appears briefly near the end of the film. And while the documentary is full of music, none of it comes from Nirvana.
Instead, Schnack visits the Pacific Northwest environs that shaped the rocker. They revisit the music and the mood that fed Cobain’s desire to become a songwriter.
Actor Jeremy Davies was in town for the showing of “Rescue Dawn,” director Herzog’s tough tale about a gung-ho Navy pilot shot down shortly after arriving in Vietnam.
Working with Herzog, a famously talented and difficult director, “should be every filmmaker’s rite of passage,” said “Rescue Dawn” producer Harry Knapp. “He really embodies the true spirit of independent filmmaking.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
