PARK CITY, UTAH -- Little Miss Sunshine they ain’t.

A documentary about a cutting-edge exhibitionist who lost his mind and a narrative feature about a girl from Harlem dealing with incest picked up the two big jury prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Despite a strong showing in the program with four films in competition, Canadian filmmakers were shut out of the awards announced Saturday, with the exception of an honourable mention to Halifax filmmaker Jason Eisener’s short, Treevenge, which offered a look at Christmas from the evergreen’s point of view.

We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s (Dig!) non-fiction film about artist Josh Harris and his webcam experiment gone awry, picked up the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. documentary. The film followed Harris as he and his girlfriend allowed their lives to be recorded and streamed on the Internet with the help of 32 motion-activated webcams in their home. The relationship hit the skids in short order, but the fireworks clearly made for an entertaining examination of privacy in the digital age.

Lee Daniels’s (Shadowboxer) Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, was a big buzz film at the festival for its raw, but potent, portrayal of a young woman who’s impregnated by her own father but somehow manages to overcome life’s intense challenges. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic competition, as well as the U.S. dramatic Audience Award.

In the international branch of the festival, the big winners were Rough Aunties and The Maid.

Rough Aunties tells the story of women who care for abandoned and orphaned children in Durban, South Africa, and it picked up the World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary for its British director Kim Longinotto.

Chilean director Sebastian Silva earned the World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic for The Maid, a narrative peek into the world of domestic “help” and their uneasy relationships with the people they serve.

In addition to the edgy Push, audiences also responded well to Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove, a documentary about the underground, and underwater, world of performing dolphins, and the people who supply them to attractions around the world. Another audience favourite was Havana Marking’s Afghan Star, a documentary about the introduction of the American Idol format into the former Taliban-led country.

The World Cinema Audience Award for dramatic feature went to An Education, the latest film from Lone Scherfig (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Italian for Beginners) starring Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson and breakout star Carey Mulligan. Set in 1961, the movie is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who befriends a charismatic older man, and must deal with the life-altering consequences.

The awards were handed out at a gala presentation Saturday night, drawing the 25th Annual Sundance Film Festival to a close.

Compared to previous years, this year’s festival was considered an unqualified success, despite severe cutbacks in the entertainment industry and a consolidated press corps. Critics were impressed by the overall quality of the programming, the lack of ambient swag suites and a renewed commitment by festival organizers to program work that falls outside the mainstream, and would never get a shot at the world stage otherwise.