A day or two after I arrived in Park City for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I found myself chatting with a documentary director at a party. As he explained, he was taking a detour from a year-long festival tour promoting his second major doc, which had premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, only to be overshadowed by some of the more star-studded projects on the program. "I mean, we got enough press," the director told me. "But Toronto is a festival where it's still possible to play under the radar. Unlike Sundance."

I had that conversation in my head as I tackled about 20 of the 125 features at this year's festival. As even the most casual follower of the film industry knows by now, Sundance has become a famously buzz-driven affair. About 75 percent of the media who attend the festival concentrate on the dozen or so films that screen in the non-competitive "Premieres" sidebar. These are usually Hollywood-financed pictures with an A- or B-list star and/or director; they tend to be the objects of bidding wars if they don't go into the Festival with distribution already secured. This means that the 105 additional films on the schedule have to fight an uphill battle to gain any visibility. In past years, the competitive Jury Awards have served as a corrective to this problem. In 2006, for instance, while Little Miss Sunshine soaked up the lion's share of headlines and distribution funds, a three-part marvel of personal, truly independent filmmaking called Iraq in Fragments quietly bagged three Jury awards. And just last week, the same production secured an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. For a film largely shot and edited by one man on a low six-figure budget, that's about as successful as you can get.

This year, the four Juries divided their accolades evenly between small "issue films" and heavily-hyped acquisition bait. Whilst Grace is Gone, the first big sale of the festival, went home with the Dramatic Audience prize as well as the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize, the World Dramatic Jury prize went to Sweet Mud, a story of life on an Israeli kibbutz that both press and Festival goers had all but ignored. Other major jury prizes went to the Afghani elections doc Enemies of Happiness (Grand Jury Prize, World Documentary) and immigration drama Padre Nuestro (Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic).

To say that many of these films were not exactly the hottest tickets of the fest would be an understatement. But Jury Prize winners rarely are. It's not that Sundance 2007 was badly programmed; of the 20 features I saw in their entirety, only two were really awful, and seven films fell somewhere between Very Good and Undeniably Great. What's interesting, I think, is that the very best films I saw at Sundance 2007 were almost completely overlooked by the Festival press corps. And since many of them screened in the somewhat marginal Spectrum sidebar, they were ineligible for profile-boosting awards. Three dramatic features are worth singling out for their formal innovation, their fresh perspective, their directors' willingness to take risks....and for the fact that each project left Sundance without distribution.