Sundance Film Festival

Today was Obama Day, and first-time director Lee Daniels was wishing the packed audience at the Eccles Theatre, Sundance’s largest, a happy one. Daniels, better known as producer of Monsters Ball and The Woodsman, with characters and situations drawn from the disenfranchised (a racist prison guard, a guilty interracial affair, a paroled child molester) was introducing his latest, Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, easily one of Sundance’s most talked-about dramas in competition.

Based on a book of fiction, Push tells the story of an overweight, withdrawn 16-year-old Harlem girl named Precious, pregnant with a second child by her own father and abused at home by her mother (searingly played by comedienne Mo‘Nique, who will surely win awards). Without spilling the plot, through creative writing Precious achieves a degree of selfhood, and the film ends in as much emotional uplift as possible given the circumstances.

If this storyline sounds especially dark, be assured that a sense of humor pervades the plot, and there was much audience laughter in places, thanks no doubt to Lee Daniel’s obvious ease and rapport with his actors, who contributed fully fleshed-out performances. During the Q&A afterwards Daniels also established an instant rapport with the overflow crowd. Not because he is African-American on Obama Day but because as a director he is clearly a rising star. It was obvious to everyone there.

Another new director whose star blazes bright at Sundance 2009 is Cary Fukunaga, whose Sin Nombre (No Name) is about a young Mexican gang member with a reluctant conscience, fleeing aboard freight trains for the U.S. border with a girl in tow whose life he saved by slaying his own gang leader. No way this story is going to end well, but Fukunaga’s stunningly cinematic 2.40 widescreen photography and ability to draw both emotional complexity and visceral performances from his Mexican cast (so perfectly cast, it’s hard to believe they’re acting) had me thinking equal parts Carlos Reygadas, Fernando Meirelles, Quentin Tarantino, and photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Sin Nombre, listed as a USA/Mexico co-production from Universal’s art house division Focus Features, is also in Sundance’s dramatic competition and could do respectable business at the box office on the basis of its powerful storytelling once word-of-mouth gets out.

Since this is a blog that concerns itself with developments in technology as well as form, it’s worth noting that both Push and Sin Nombre were shot in 35mm with a D.I. finish, while all of the documentaries I’ve seen so far were shot in HD and projected as HD. It’s also worth noting that, in general, the overall quality of photography and lighting, whether film- or digital-based, is at an all-time high. Gone forever, it seems, are golf-ball sized film grain and milky underexposure, or the stair-stepping (aliasing) of diagonal detail common to DV camcorders five years ago. Credit goes, I presume, to Kodak for faster, finer film stocks, to Japan Inc. for all the latest incredible HD camcorders, and to today’s film schools, which often provide the same cameras to students that professionals make a living with. The Bolex era of student filmmaking is but a distant memory.

Did I leave out RED? I didn’t mean to—I’ve seen all 4.5 hours of Soderbergh’s Che twice–although I’ve yet to learn of any films at Sundance 2009 shot with the RED ONE. But whether or not there are RED projects at Sundance this year, its disruptive technology cum marketing are already impacting both low- and medium-budget filmmaking, threatening to turn high-end film and digital cameras and the camera houses that rent them into a distant memory too.

To wit, I had an enlightening conversation with Tom Fletcher of Chicago/Detroit-based Fletcher Camera at the New Frontier on Main (the annual Sundance tech showcase, this year emphasizing video art installations in a series called “Artists and Scientists”). Tom is unique among camera rental facility owners in that he actually attends Sundance each year to gain insight into trends in indie film production. (He loves the films too.) And what he had to say this year isn’t comforting.

Fletcher Camera (www.fletch.com), he explained, owns a RED ONE and has eight more on consignment, available as needed. The problem on the horizon for the camera rental business is that the body of the RED ONE, which boasts a Super-35mm sensor that can capture a 4K image many times larger than HD, is so affordable at $17,500 that a new class of owner-operators has already sprung up.

As a result, per Tom, camera assistants spend all day at his facility hobnobbing with staff and soliciting free technical advice when all they intend to rent is a matte box or a 35mm cine lens for their RED ONE. That’s not a sustainable business model for a camera rental house, so Tom is rethinking his business, imagining it as a service business someday, dispensing technical supervision for a cost. In the meantime, renting PL-mount cine lenses ought to remain a good business (a single prime lens can cost $20,000) even as RED ONE cameras proliferate. Tom says he’s going to rename his business Fletcher Lenses and Cameras.

You see, change is a two-edged sword. To get change, something else must change first. I would hate to see large camera houses compromised by a drop-off in camera rentals due to cheap digital alternatives (Canon’s recent 5D Mark II SLR with its 35mm-sized sensor takes impressive HD video for less than $3000). That would inevitably mean fewer choices and less flexibility for those of us in production, film or digital.

Whatever the future brings, change in a shifting world can only be resisted for so long. My day began early this morning at The Spur Bar and Grill on Main Street at a gathering hosted by legendary producer’s rep Jeff Dowd (inspiration for “The Big Lebowksi”). As Obama took his historic oath of office, the room choked up and the tears flowed freely.

Because that’s a change we can believe in, on this Obama Day in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival.

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