PARK CITY, Utah — Not familiar with the work of Courtney Hunt? You’re not alone.

Less than a week ago, in an interview with The New York Sun, the first-time filmmaker embraced her outsider status: “Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would be happening,” she said. “I’m just trying to enjoy the roller coaster.”

If this year’s Sundance Film Festival has indeed been Ms. Hunt’s own personal thrill ride, then it sure ended with one heck of a loop-de-loop, concluding with a flourish that thrust her and her film, “Frozen River,” into the spotlight for all to see. As the critics and the celebrities, the filmmakers and the film buyers, converged for a final climactic evening Saturday in the mountains of northern Utah, it was Ms. Hunt’s “Frozen River” that was named the winner of the festival’s coveted dramatic Grand Jury Prize, edging out the likes of Christine Jeffs’s “Sunshine Cleaning,” the star-studded powerhouse featuring Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, and Steve Zahn, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar,” the pair’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2006’s “Half Nelson.”

Only a few days earlier, Sony Pictures Classics had inked a deal with Ms. Hunt to release “Frozen River.” The film centers on a single mother (Melissa Leo) in upstate New York who is abandoned and left penniless by her husband. With destitution imminent, she gradually befriends a local Mohawk woman (Misty Upham) who earns her own money by smuggling immigrants into America from Canada by way of the frozen St. Lawrence River — a profitable venture, if the ice holds. Talking last week mere hours before finalizing the deal with Sony, Ms. Hunt said her screenplay grew more complex and dense over time, segueing organically from issues of family and friendship to the contentious topic of illegal immigration.

The 43-year-old Tennessee native (and current resident of Columbia County, located several hours north of New York City) enrolled in the MFA filmmaking program at Columbia University only after completing a law degree in Boston, using her time on the Upper West Side to learn screenwriting with Romulus Linney and directing with Paul Schrader and Bette Gordon. After watching Ms. Leo star in the film “21 Grams” at a local festival, Ms. Hunt said, she had the chance to meet the actress, and pitched her on a short film she was making.

The short, an early incarnation of “Frozen River,” went on to screen at the New York Film Festival and afforded Ms. Hunt a chance to capture the attention of the talent and financiers needed to construct a feature film. After weeks of frigid filming upstate, and after some prodding by her crew, Ms. Hunt submitted the work to Sundance. Now, only a few months later, she finds herself the winner of this year’s dramatic competition.

Other New York winners at Sundance included Jonathan Levine’s “The Wackness,” a romantic comedy, set in New York circa 1994, about a pot-dealing teenager(Josh Peck) and his pot-smoking therapist (Ben Kingsley). Though it divided critics, the film sufficiently wowed audiences to take home this year’s dramatic Audience Award. Elsewhere, New Yorker Alex Rivera won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for “Sleep Dealer,” his futuristic family drama, set in Mexico, about water shortages, exploitive corporations, and illegal immigration.

* * *

In an interview late Saturday night, Thom Powers, the local organizer of the weekly Stranger Than Fiction documentary series at IFC Center, talked about two of his top three titles from this year’s Festival (both of which were honored with awards less than an hour later by juries and audiences). The first, James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” was a big word-of-mouth title in Park City, recounting the story of Philippe Petit’s high-wire stroll between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. The film took home both the World Cinema Jury Prize for Documentary and the corresponding audience award.

“Talk about a great film for New York audiences,” Mr. Powers said, pointing to the film’s reconstruction of Mr. Petit’s downtown drama in vivid detail. “There are many out there like me, who have just a passing knowledge of what happened there. But still, even knowing how this is going to end, it plays out as almost a sort of utterly captivating caper film.”

Another of Mr. Powers’s picks, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s “Trouble the Water,” stirred emotional outbursts from festival audiences, offering an on-the-ground, autobiographical account of what it was like to survive New Orleans in the moments and days following Hurricane Katrina. Saturday night, the film took the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.

The festival’s two other major awards went to Jens Jonsson’s “King of Ping Pong” (World Cinema Jury Prize for Drama), the story of an isolated16-year-old Swede who finds salvation in the unlikely game of table tennis, and Joshua Tickell’s “Fields of Fuel” (Audience Award for Documentary), the story of a young activist who set out on a cross-country trek to examine why we’ve become so addicted to fossil fuels and what alternatives can feasibly help us to break the cycle.

If you’re asking this critic, however, I found my most riveting Sundance experience at the world premiere of Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden’s “Sugar.” A moving story that begins as an insider’s glimpse into the world of Major League Baseball and the remote academies the league sets up in the Dominican Republic to recruit and train cheap young talent, the film grows confidently into something far more profound and universal. By journey’s end, “Sugar” is an examination of America through the eyes of a Dominican teenager (played hauntingly by Algenis Perez Soto) who finds himself only after turning his back on all the hype and expectations and reinventing himself in New York City.

“Sugar” didn’t win any awards, but don’t be surprised if it is the title people remember most when all is said and done. This year’s Sundance motto was the rather ambiguous “Films Take Place,” and as far as I was concerned, “Sugar” was the only screening in which something profound seemed to be taking place. Like the best of Sundance in any year, it broke free of conventions and asserted itself as something gloriously unexpected.

ssnyder@nysun.com