Tonight’s awards ceremony handed out 26 awards to feature-length films. You can peruse the list here

This year 118 features were programmed from 21 countries, including 42 first-time directors. U.S. submissions of feature-length films totaled 1,905. An additional 1,756 features were submitted from outside the U.S.

That makes a total of 3661 features submitted, or 230 days of screening if viewed in their entirety. How does Sundance manage it? more

Yesterday all you heard about here in Park City, at every bus stop and bar stool, was the critic who poked the producer’s rep in the schnoz.

In fact, the first email I received yesterday morning from a filmmaker friend said, “aren’t you glad Jeff Dowd doesn’t know about you?”

Dowd, a/k/a The Dude, a/k/a the Big Lebowski, apparently chased Variety’s John Anderson into a restaurant after Anderson indicated his dislike for Dirt! The Movie, a Documentary Competition film that Dowd is repping. more

Oh no, you plead, not another blog about adventures in festival transportation! You have my promise this will be the last.

Tonight I decided to pack it in early and head back to the condo. I’m beat. Last night I’d jammed on electric guitar until 6 a.m. at New York entertainment attorney Jonathan Gray’s condo, a yearly tradition for which he supplies guitars and amps–always a Sundance highlight of mine. (This year Jonathan has legal credits in twelve Sundance dramas including Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, Against the Current, and Big Fan.)

At the Main Street bus terminal I waited and waited in a light drizzle for the No. 7 bus to Kimball Junction. A young man soon joined me. He wore a droopy dark jacket over a black tee with a huge white skull like Jack Skellington’s. A silver ring protruded from his lower lip and lanky black hair fell from his side part across his forehead. While waiting, I asked what films he’d seen. He loved World Cinema Dramatic Competition entry “Louis-Michel,” saying it reminded him of the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet who directed one of his two favorite films, Amélie. He had tickets to The Informers and Moon in the Premieres section, both of which he was anxious to see in the morning. more

Park City basked in the afterglow of Obama Day as rising temperatures caused snowboarders to come off the slopes at noon to strip off layers of clothing. A pleasant day to ride around in buses—something you do a lot of here, stuck at bus stops anxiously eyeing your watch as your next film begins, or strap-hanging aboard a menagerie of sluggish Festival shuttles and Park City buses that pick their way through branching back streets, stopping at resorts you never knew existed.

It was bad enough years ago when the main theater circuit was the Egyptian on Main Street, the Holiday Village multiplex near Albertson’s, and the makeshift auditorium in the Prospector. With luck—meaning the shuttle-bus gods deemed to smile on you—you could dash between them in 20 minutes. Or jump in your car and zoom off, which I did often. more

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. more

Yesterday I touched upon some of the reasons the air has been let out of Sundance’s balloon this year. And ballooned it has, for a decade. Today walking Main Street’s uncrowded sidewalks, devoid of the usual hypesters and scenesters, I’m thinking that this year’s soft attendance is a gift. And a sign that the Festival might want to recalibrate.

When the Sundance Institute took over the Festival 25 years ago, American independent films were 16mm, low-budget, and all but locked out of the box office. While chances of theatrical success remain as remote today as ever—admittedly there have been giant strides for documentary, Michael Moore’s body of work for example, or those penguins—digital technology with its protean reach, low entry cost and endlessly rising quality has at least leveled the playing field as far as production goes. more

The indie-film summit known as the Sundance Film Festival began Thursday and continues for ten days through next Sunday, a week from now–although you wouldn’t know it from Park City’s mostly empty Main Street. Not that there are tumbleweeds and doleful Morricone harmonica strains, but the clogging crowds are gone along with the stretch limos bearing the Parises, Britneys, and Lindsays of yesteryear. What joy!

No doubt the economy has taken a toll. Boisterous teen revelers and obvious hangers-on are in short supply this year. Also, a lot of left-coast industry types arrived to attend weekend festivities only to depart today—a trend that’s been building for several years, regrettably shifting the media’s attention away from the second week when important awards ceremonies take place. more

Swedish writer/director Patrik Eklund recently cut a show reel for a local magician and ended up with four hours of footage of the hapless man and—more importantly—an idea for a new short film. The result is Instead of Abracadabra, a very funny and sweet 22-minute short about a twentysomething slacker who lives with his parents and dreams of being a magician.

The trick up Eklund’s sleeve is recognizing that very important moment of suspense right before the magician plunges the sword into the box containing his volunteer. If a magician is truly awful, that person in the box really should be scared for their life. Since Tomas (Simon Berger) has already sent his mother to the hospital doing the same trick, the audience now knows that anything can happen. more

Stop-motion animation has been making a bit of a comeback recently. Despite the long hours it takes to put something together with this age-old animation technique, it can be a refreshing change of pace for viewers inundated with similar-looking computer animation and widespread CGI special effects.

Max Winston’s short film I Live in the Woods! is literally an eye-popping visual experience. It starts off with a feverish exclamation from a high-jumping, superpowered hillbilly about his love of the woods. It ends up being a hilariously violent and absurd romp that goes way beyond the forest and up to the heavens—not exactly what you’d expect from an animator who is currently working on a short film for Sesame Street. more

The Nature Between Us is in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Short category, but it’s the animated portion of the 5-minute film that takes it to a whole new level. Director William Campbell and his cohorts are part of a Los Angeles-based collective known as Team G Entertainment, and in cooperation with New York-based collective Superfad, Campbell has created a unique blend of highly stylized live-action and 3D computer animation that is masquerading as a lost VHS tape.

Looking like some sort of sick cross between In Living Color and Saved by the Bell, The Nature Between Us is colored in enough bright neon to make Speed Racer jealous. As the camera swings between cliques of graffiti artists, popular girls, and radical bike dudes, a laugh track underscores the artificialness of the “street scene” set around them. more