Sun is down, dance is done

The mental film blender of Sundance is now complete. We woke as if with a hangover, story lines and characters and moments all swirling together. Wolfed down the last of our groceries for breakfast, stuffed our things in the rental car, and staggered off to the airport. Fellow Sundance-goers could be seen snaking through the security lines, with a mildly lost look. It's all sort of reminiscent of the stagger through the parking lot after a major concert experience…what was that encore tune again?

Courage at the Close. My final day began with two of the highlight films of the festival for me. Freedom Riders and Restrepo, both of which detail people calling upon unimaginable courage - albeit at different times, for very different reasons.

We saw Freedom Riders, which I blogged about before, first thing in the morning, and followed that by Restrepo, a film about the deployment of a platoon of soldiers in the Korengal Valley, the most remote and dangerous place in Afghanistan. Vanity Fair contributors Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington each took five one-month trips there and spent the time living with and photographing these soldiers. The result is probably the most intimate document of either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and the young soldiers fighting it. Truly remarkable and, thankfully, the film lets the soldiers speak for themselves and focuses only on their experience. Wider political and strategic questions are left for other discussions. The result is an invitation into a band of brothers and it's a truly remarkable experience. More on this film can be found here.

The Sundance Jury agreed as the film later won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary filmmaking. The complete results of the awards can be found here.

Thankfully Tom and I were able to see almost all of the award-winning films. Winter's Bones, which we both liked, won two awards. Well, plane is boarding, must go....

Doug

(The top shot is of Tom in the Salt Lake City airport doing his final compilation of film notes and ideas in preparation for our post-mortem CFF programming meeting on the flight home.)