Kick off
At the official Sundance kickoff press conference, Robert Redford was, as he always is, conversational and politely unequivocal. He‘s always been open about his constitutional convictions and the role filmmakers play in speaking truth to power, whether that‘s studio, corporate, or governmental power.
This year, Sundance has made an explicit case for the importance of independent documentaries by choosing to open the festival with Brett Morgen‘s Chicago 10, a fascinating multimedia documentary about key events of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
Morgan joined Redford and festival director Geoffrey Gilmore on the dais and put his film‘s seeming prescience into perspective. As tailor made as it may seem to current events it is an almost accidental relevance. Morgen says he wanted to make a film about the lost art of speaking out as a key component of democracy, especially for the young. No one is more surprised that over the five years he was in production, the film became increasingly topical, all the more so in the last few weeks.
Redford says Pathe news reels and the work of filmmakers like the Masles taught him “how entertaining a sharp-edged truth could be.” Chicago 10 could not be further in style from newsreels or the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic, incorporating animation, archival footage, and dramatic recreations.
So choosing this film as the festival opener seems to make another statement. To me it signals the festival‘s embrace of the new visual vocabulary that is emerging in our digital culture. It is a film that could only have been made with computers. It is full of the kind of non-literal, multi-threaded thought that modern audiences understand. And now it is the first multimedia film to open Sundance.
