25th Annual IFP Gotham Independent Film Award Winners Announced

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) tonight announced the winners of the 25h Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards at its awards ceremony held at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

Winning the Best Feature, Best Screenplay, and a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Performance was Spotlight, director Tom McCarthy’s dramatic retelling of the Boston Globe’s investigative unit’s coverage in 2002 of the Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal. McCarthy also shared Spotlight’s Best Screenplay win with co-writer Josh Singer.

The award for Best Documentary went to The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film that follows an optician as he confronts the men who killed the brother he never knew during the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide. The harrowing and moving documentary serves as a companion piece to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, for which he previously won the 2013 Gotham Award for Best Documentary.

24th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards – winners

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) tonight announced the winners of the 24thAnnual Gotham Independent Film Awards at its awards ceremony held at Cipriani Wall Street, in New York City.

Winning the Best Feature award was Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stylistically adventurous existential comedy in which a Hollywood actor attempts to revive his career and obliterate his superhero image past by producing and starring in a serious Broadway drama. Iñárritu previously received a Gotham Tribute in 2006.

The award for Best Documentary went to CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras’ inside, of-the-moment telling of the Edward Snowden revelations on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies – the third film in her trilogy on post-9/11 America.

Poitras previously won this award in 2010 for The Oath, the second film in the trilogy.