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.)

A window into history

Tom and I saw Freedom Riders first thing this morning. Some incredible newly-found archival footage (courtesy of the FBI no less) marks this compelling film. A great window into the early days of the Kennedy administration as well as the civil rights movement. Includes some great interviews with the Freedom Riders themselves, the then governor of Alabama (John Patterson), and JFK Administration adviser John Seigenthaler.

Impressive as a window into history, but also as a testament to human courage in the face of almost certain violence. A keeper.

Doug

Down to the last dance

I can feel the festival simmering down. I will still have about five films on Saturday, but the energy of the town is bubbling down. Now that all of the films have been played at least twice, a lot of the deals have been done. So the dog and pony show of celebrities is pretty much over. But the one thing remaining is the awards.

Sundance is broken up into categories for international and domestic documentaries and features. There are also awards for shorts. So they leave these blank spots in the schedule that are audience favorites or juried winners. We have bought tickets for Saturday’s Juried Feature Award winner. We have no idea what the film is. We may have already seen it. I think we are both rooting for Winter Bone.

There are some favorites that we hope will win, but we also hope that it is a film we haven’t seen. This is just another example of the festival coming to an end.

I have had the best time this year. I have covered a lot of ground as far as sheer volume of screenings, but as importantly I have more than a dozen new contacts. I met so many interesting people this week. Directors, screenwriters, distributors, actors, and, of course, other film fans have all made this week fascinating. It is like a parallel world where ideas and the arts are king. I love it and feel very uplifted to be here. It is a real honor.

It is going to be great for CFF to have all these contacts. I will begin emailing all the films that I liked and start figuring out how to get in touch with the folks that I did not meet. The name of the game now is to get screener DVDs so I can have our programming committee get to work finding the best films for our community. If I have collected 10 business cards, Doug surely has double that number.

I saw a film that troubled me so deeply that I held my gut as I left the theater. It is called Shock Doctrine. It argues that the ideas of economist Milton Friedman have led to capitalism profiting off of disaster. Disaster comes in many guises--hurricanes, coup d’etats, and wars. The film purports that the leaders who rise out of these crisis moments are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, the Russian oligarchs, and Paul Bremmer during the shock-and-awe period. It is a heady, compelling, and shocking film. If you want to know more, check it out here.

Sundance is just the start of a nine-month process that actually gets filmmakers and their films to come to our community. Even though I have another scintillating day ahead of me, I can feel the magic and mirth of Sundance coming down a notch. The race is coming to an end. We have been on fire. Entranced in the sorcery known as cinema.

Tom

Sundance: not just movies

Sundance also features lots of music--and theater, too. Here's a clip from Grace Potter and the Nocturnals at the Sundance Music Café.

Doug

(You might want to turn your volume down a bit before the clip starts.)

Swimmers at Sundance (again)

Yesterday I stopped by the Sundance Filmmakers Lodge--a sort of quiet resting place for filmmakers to get coffee and check email--and lo and behold Swimmers was playing on the Sundance Channel. Strange.

Doug

(Note: Doug wrote and directed Swimmers, which was nominated for a Humanitas Prize at Sundance and nabbed a New American Cinema Award in 2005.)

Guerilla art strikes Sundance

Graffitti purportedly by well-known reclusive artist Banksy, who has a surprise film here called Exit Through The Gift Shop, appeared throughout Park City prior to the festival.

Apparently Park City police spray-painted over much of it, but this one was saved because the building's owner liked it.

The mystery of Banksy is explained a bit here.

Doug

One of my favorites

This is Doug swapping cards with the director (left) Adriana Maggs and star, Tatiana Maslany, of Grown Up Movie Star.

This film is in my top three of the whole festival and I hope we can get it. A coming of age dramedy from Newfoundland.

Tom