Sundance Film Festival

Gray skies persist and the big awards show arrives tomorrow night as Sundance 2008 draws to a close. Yet there are still surprises.

Last year I pulled out all the stops and attended thirty films in a week, my Sundance personal best. I took quiet pride in my diligence. Yet I still managed to miss Little Miss Sunshine and many other buzz-worthy films. Do the math and you’ll see why. If Sundance programs 120 films and I managed to see 30, then I’ve missed 75% of Sundance’s best programming despite my best efforts. That’s why it’s often hard to have a conversation here about what everyone’s seen in common. Often we haven’t.

Today I saw Ballast, a dramatic competition film preoccupying the grapevine for days. Everyone I ran into recommended it, to the point where it had become a sort of common currency of Sundance conversation. When its publicist, Susan Norget, a true lover of film and anything but a flack, sent an email announcing an additional press screening, she added, “Yes, it’s as good as you’ve heard. Maybe the strongest feature debut I’ve ever represented at Sundance.”

What’s the fuss about? Consider the ingredients:

• A small cast—four main roles–mostly non-professional actors, African-American locals from in and around rural Canton, Mississippi, 20 miles north of Jackson, geographic heart of the state and Mississippi Delta.

• Existing locations. Mostly overcast winter exteriors.

• Story notes, no script. Two-month rehearsal. Much improvisation.

• No music or scoring.

• First-time director—writer, editor, producer too—previously an art director for commercials and studio films.

• Super 35mm, 2.35 aspect ratio, Aaton and Arri cameras, 100% handheld, available light.

• Jump cuts mostly. One and a half years of editing.

• An elemental plot: a man finds his identical twin dead from sleeping pills then shoots himself. He recovers, only to be held up at gunpoint by his brother’s angry young son, a wayward kid who lives with his mother and is indebted to a local drug dealer. After the dealer roughs up both mother and son, the two flee, ending up at the house of the recovering twin brother. When the mother is fired from her job scrubbing toilets, she reluctantly attempts to reopen the roadside grocery and filling station the twins inherited from their father. That’s about it.

Although the plot can be readily outlined it is not easily distilled, because Ballast is a tonal poem formed of call-and-response silences in which emotion and fear are rarely put to words. The main characters communicate with eyes and posture (often downcast), even feet, in the form of actions they take, places they go.

The final shot catches you off guard, like a sudden punch to the gut, as it abruptly cuts you off from characters you’ve come to care deeply about.

Director Lance Hammer hails from Ventura, California, worlds away from the distressed Mississippi Delta. Racially he’s European.

The remarkable DoP (how they write it in the U.K.) is Lol Crawley, who is indeed English, more worlds away.

Even more remarkably, the executive producer is Andrew Adamson, the director of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I couldn’t make up a detail like that.

Ballast reeks of authenticity, the sort no amount of art direction or professional acting can ensure.

Godard once said, “through documentary one arrives at the structure of the theatre, and through theatrical imagination and fiction one arrives at the reality of life.” What he meant, if I may, is that in film, documentary tends towards the principles of drama, while drama tends towards the realism of documentary. (The great DP Ed Lachman [I’m Not There], who got his start in docs, takes it a step further, saying that in his dramatic cinematography, each take is a documentary of the actor’s unique performance in that moment.)

If ever there were a film that embodied both halves of Godard’s maxim, it’s Ballast. Only Lance Hammer knows who his contemporary influences are, but two good guesses are Belgium’s Dardenne brothers and Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas. Classic influences might include Bresson and Rossellini.

I find myself rarely evoking such names while describing Sundance films. (Smile.)

For this die-hard idealist and cineaste, one thing is certain: Ballast, which also opens at the Berlin Film Festival next month, is the sort of cinematic achievement Sundance exists for.

Otherwise what’s the point?

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