Sundance Film Festival

Sundance wasn‘t even a day old when The Sundance Channel bought Jennifer Fox‘s six-hour film Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. Shot all over the world across 8 years, the cinematography is a conversation among Fox and the women she meets along the way; they pass a Sony PDX10 back and forth as they circle around and through the subjects of life: survival, freedom, gratitude, loss, power and fear, diminishment and emergence. And gossip.

“Film is thin,” Fox suggests, “it doesn‘t allow you to do the width of human life or female conversations. This was a way to get to some of the thickness of female conversation. Passing the camera replicates the way we speak as women.”

Some 1700 of footage later it was time to edit. That‘s where Patrick Lindenmaier came in. You may remember him from Swiss Effects. For Fox he devised an unlike network that pulled together two Avid Xpress Pros (with Mojo) and 13 drives for editor Niels Pagh Andersen. “It wasn‘t supposed to work, but it did,” Fox says simply.

Perhaps this is why she is prepared to edit her new feature Learning to Swim from 15 years worth of footage. “I make about one big film a decade,” she says. Her first film Beirut: The Last Home Movie won the Grand Jury Prize and Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance 1988; in the ‘90s she created the 10-hour PBS series An American Love Story.