DIFF WINNERS: The Dallas International Film Festival called it a year over the weekend. And on Friday night, the festival awards were handed out at the Dallas Film Society Honors dinner at the Hotel Palomar. Pit Stop, directed by former Dallasite Yen Tan, won the Grand Jury Prize in the Texas competition, while God Love Uganda and A Teacher won the documentary and narrative contests, respectively. You can see all the winners on the festival website. Quick funny story from the awards ceremony: Two straight awards were given to directors (including Tan) who weren’t there, but who were reachable by cellphone. So they thanked the crowd from the podium via speaker phone. Fast forward a few minutes, to when the prizes for the shorts were given out. This time, the winners were there, and when they reached the podium, one of the producers said (tongue firmly in cheek): “We made the mistake of coming here. We didn’t realize the common procedure was to talk through the phone.”

HOME AND AWAY: It was a big weekend for The Dallas Opera. First, on Friday night, the opera performed The Aspern Papers, which it premiered 25 years ago. “Two hours’ worth of music, in two acts, the opera tells a harrowing story adapted from the Henry James novella,” Scott Cantrell writes on dallasnews.com. “The orchestral writing is extraordinarily beautiful. After runs in Dallas, Washington, San Francisco, Germany and Sweden, the opera disappeared, but the new production argues strongly for revival.” Then on Saturday, it was time for the big simulcast of Turnadot at Cowboys Stadium. As Jerome reports, 14,000 turned out for that one – a tic lower than the crowd that attended the first simulcast there last year.

GO AHN: On Tuesday night, the Ahn Trio makes its AT&T Performing Arts Center debut. The group is made up of three sisters playing violin, piano and cello – all are Julliard grads. And they’ve earned praise for working with living composers. Angela (the violinist) says there’s an advantage to that approach. “You also get spoiled working with living composers and always having them around for discussions and back and forth,” she tells theaterjones.com. “We can never talk with Beethoven.”