A sensation at Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah - On Saturday, for only the third time in the 25-year history of the Sundance Film Festival, the same movie took home the festival's top jury and audience awards. This year's big winner was

Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire

, the second film directed by West Philadelphia native Lee Daniels.

"I was shocked," Daniels said yesterday. "The press was saying I was going to get both awards, but I've been on juries before, and I know that they hate being predictable. So as soon as they started saying that, I immediately said, 'That's it. Let's go home.' I wasn't even going to show up to the awards ceremony. But my kids told me to, so I showed."

Push, which was also awarded a special acting prize for star Mo'Nique, takes on dark and disturbing subjects, but the film's approach, equal parts gritty realism and eye-popping fantasy, won over critics and audience from its first screening. The film is still without a distributor, but Daniels said he was expecting to close a deal within a day or two.

Daniels says he has been fielding offers since he landed in Park City nearly two weeks ago, but that his insistence on marketing the film to a broad range of audiences has been a sticking point. "This goes beyond the urban audience or the art-house audience," he said. "It's for that white guy in Oklahoma, or that Indian in Albuquerque." Winning the audience award, he says, vindicates his conviction that "this is not just my story."

If Daniels has a motto, it would be something like what he told the audience before the film's Jan. 16 premiere: "If you're going to tell a bold story, be bold." Still, he admits, his hands were trembling as he introduced the film.

Push's unflinchingly bleak subject matter is enough to make anyone nervous. Precious (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) is an obese Harlem teenager who is pregnant with her second child, conceived, like the first, by her own father. Her mother (a powerhouse performance by the comedienne Mo'Nique) is a figure out of nightmare or myth, a housebound monster who abuses her both physically and sexually. Add to that the fact that Precious is illiterate and you have a recipe for overload, a movie stuffed with subjects any one of which would more than suffice for a typical feature.

But typical features are not where Daniels' interests lie. After years as a casting director and talent manager, Daniels began his producing career with Monster's Ball, the 2001 film in which Halle Berry plays a death-row inmate's wife who has an affair with a racist prison guard. Daniels followed that with The Woodsman, with Kevin Bacon as a pedophile struggling to rebuild his life.

In Daniels' 2005 directorial debut, Shadowboxer, Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. play a mother and stepson who fall into a quasi-incestuous relationship. Also, they're both contract killers. And she has cancer.

Daniels, who was raised in West and Southwest Philadelphia, is used to extremes. "I've seen some pretty brutal stuff," he said, in Park City a few days after the movie's premiere. "I've witnessed murder, people dying. And I would go into my own fantasy. I did what Precious did."

In Push, Precious frequently withdraws from traumatic circumstances into a world of her own, one in which she is a supermodel, or an actress at a glitzy premiere. The fantasy sequences are greatly expanded from Sapphire's novel, and often wholly invented, serving as release for the movie's audience as well as its protagonist. "I often worry about whether it was true to the book," Daniels said. "But I don't think it could have been any truer, because I wouldn't have an audience."

Sundance is well-stocked with dark movies full of suffering and anguish, but Push takes a different approach, one reason it has been greeted so warmly here. Daniels calls the look "stylized grit," a blend of handheld realism and brightly hued exaggeration.

The movie is not intent on broadcasting its authenticity, perhaps because Daniels, unlike many of Sundance's filmmakers, has actually lived something like the story he's telling. He modeled Precious' apartment after the one he grew up in. Daniels' father, a police officer, was killed in a drug bust when Daniels was 13, but he still has vivid memories of the beatings he endured at his father's hands. The fact that Daniels is gay fueled his father's rage.

Daniels has been open about the abuse, and about his anger toward his father. But in working on Push, he found his attitude shifting. The movie's emotional high point is a lengthy scene in which Mo'Nique's character unburdens herself to a social worker (played by an almost unrecognizable Mariah Carey), simultaneously revealing the depth of her sickness and her own inner turmoil.

"My movies are therapeutic," said Daniels, who lives in New York these days. "What I learned from this movie is that my father really loved me so much. I'm almost embarrassed, now, having told that secret, because I think that discredits the man he really was. He was a kind man, but a man that came from this hard-core discipline, ruthlessness, thinking that would make me a man."

Although the learning curve is traditionally less steep on a director's second film, Daniels said the process of making Push was much more difficult, partly due to the subject matter and partly due to the fact that Push was shot in New York and Shadowboxer was shot in Philadelphia.

"I don't look at it as the end product, but rather the entirety, the making-of and the process," Daniels said. "And the process I had with Shadowboxer was far more exciting and more fun and more rewarding than that of Push. Push was hard. It was cold. It was painful to shoot. And to New Yorkers, I was one of many people. I wasn't special.

"In Philadelphia, I'm a native, so they were really excited. In New York, it's like, 'Next!' " Daniels was so distressed by the crew's indifference that he took the unusual, and costly, step of shutting down production so he could repopulate the set with some of his Philadelphia familiars. In New York, he said, "they didn't care about the movie. And they didn't care about me."

Ongoing relationships are key to Daniels' process. Carey would hardly have been an obvious fit for the role of a Jewish social worker from Long Island, and she was reluctant to act again after the critical pounding she took for Glitter. But Daniels coaxed her in front of the camera, where she delivers a surprisingly natural performance, as does Daniels' longtime friend Lenny Kravitz, in a small role as a male nurse.

"Casting Mariah Carey in the film was as bold as making the film," Daniels said. "I felt that if I was going to put myself out there, I might as well put myself all the way out there, so there were no limitations at all. I knew it was either going to be a train wreck or beauty."