Sundance Film Festival

Reality sets in, this last day of Sundance, as 50,000 attendees move on to greener pastures and the glistening snow-covered peaks encircling Park City once again seem a part of the natural landscape instead of a fancy festival backdrop. Down below on Main Street, festival dreams and destinies have intersected. All that remains is for this year’s festival to fade to memory.
Riffing off Barry Levinson’s Robert DeNiro-starrer about a harried Hollywood producer which premiered out-of-competition (I quite liked it), The Hollywood Reporter captured the received take on this year’s festival with its headline, “Stunned ‘dance: What Just Happened?â€? more…

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. more…

Overcast again. Blues skies aren’t forever.
A slow day. Overheard a klatch of industry veterans planning a Walmart release of the DVD of a festival film, a well-regarded but talky interview-style doc. Can’t see how it could appeal to a mass-market crowd, Walmart’s or otherwise. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere, the high altitude of Park City that causes Sundance’s storied reality dissociation. Over the years savvy buyers have learned to take a deep breath and count to ten (or ten days) before agreeing to a hype-inflated deal at Park City. Many have been burned in the past by acquisitions vibrant with Sundance buzz that sputter months later when introduced to the public. more…

By Michael Goldman

Veteran rocker Neil Young (using his filmmaking alter-ego, Bernard Shakey) hit Sundance to promote his new movie, CSNY Deja Vu–the film chosen to close the festival. The movie documents the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 2004 Freedom of Speech tour, and the reaction to the tour’s anti-war message across North America just around the time that public opinion began to turn against events in Iraq. Young teamed with veteran television journalist Mike Cerre to intermingle concert footage from the tour with a series of journalistic vignette stories produced by Cerre at Young’s behest, all shot in HD, covering people and events surrounding the tour–from his band-mate Steven Stills’ work campaigning for Democratic candidates to Iraq veterans using music to protest the war to some vocal fans reacting with great anger to the band’s political message. After arriving at Sundance, Young spoke with millimeter senior editor Michael Goldman about his reasons for making the movie, his growing interest in filmmaking, and his views on the use of film as a medium for creating political dialogue.

To listen to the podcast interview click here.
(To download: Right Click, Save As)
Check out our entire Sundance Podcast Archive.

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.
No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.
Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!� as the lights dim.
Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here? more…

Director Sean Ellis and DP Angus Hudson sit on either side of me at the Filmmaker Lodge—Hudson, smart and earnest, Ellis, savvy and charismatic, with an actors expressiveness; they seem an unlikely team until they start trading thoughts about The Broken.

“I’ve never been so proud of something I’ve shot,� Hudson is saying, and that’s an understatement for what the pair accomplished visually. The two previously collaborated on Ellis’ short Cashback produced through Ridley Scott’s company RSA. But they had a much bigger canvas to fill on The Broken and an ambition to do something that has never been easy: scary movie that’s more atmosphere than gore.

Of course if anyone at this festival knows how to manipulate an image for atmosphere it’s Ellis, one of the world’s foremost fashion photographers, known for images that take their glamour from an almost impossible fluency with light and muscular storytelling that is often described as cinematic. It strikes me as he talks about the darkroom techniques of dodging and burning, as his hands make the familiar, urgent motions–shaping the volatile mix of chemicals and time–that he thinks reflexively, like a cinematographer. He describes making movies like making photographs, with the emphasis on making. more…

Press Release

Andrew Herwitz, president of the The Film Sales Company, announced that the company has acquired worldwide (less UK) sales and US distribution rights to the documentary Derek. Directed by famed artist and filmmaker Issac Julien (Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels), the film was written and is narrated by 2007 Academy Award Nominee Tilda Swinton. Funded by Film London, Channel 4, MoMA and the Sundance Documentary Fund, the film was produced by Eliza Mellor and Colin MacCabe and executive produced by Swinton and James Mackay. more…

Park City’s been overcast and gray since Day 1, but this morning a brilliant platinum light tore a hole in the endless cloud cover and ignited the overlooking Wasatch peaks, back-lighting a sparkly veil of glassy no-see-ums, tiny ice crystals too delicate to form flakes, that danced on wafts of air until they melted in my face.

Yes, I admit the night before I’d seen Academy-award nominee (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney’s latest masterwork, Gonzo, the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, but I deny any pharmaceutical inspiration, at least this early in the morning, as I stop before the Yarrow Hotel to marvel at this floaty, twinkly, sun-lit scrim. Inside the Yarrow a press screening of Morgan Spurlock’s latest saga-in-cheek, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, is almost underway, and I race into the theater to find a seat just as the lights fall.

Both docus, I’m happy to report, are polished to high theatrical sheen with eye-catching graphics, animated illustrations (the great Ralph Steadman in Gonzo), and well-crafted high-definition cinematography (D.P. Maryse Alberti in Gonzo). Both acquaint audiences with past and present avatars of U.S. politics: the tragic George McGovern, smarmy Richard Nixon, idealistic Jimmy Carter (Gonzo); the hubristic tag team of W. and Osama (Where in the World…). Both deserve and will likely obtain limited theatrical runs (though Sundance 2008 has been notably short of acquisitions so far). more…

Click here for a handy, continually updated chart of distribution deals from Sundance 2008 so far.

Editor Monique Zavistovski was 8 months pregnant with her first child when she innocently agreed to cut Circus Rosaire. Director Robyn Bliley wasn’t a mother, so couldn’t have known just how optimistic Zavistovski’s commitment really was, or how central the Baby Chloe would become to post production. You’ll hear filmmakers talk about family—that’s how close things sometimes get making some films. But among filmmaker family stories, the making of Circus Rosaire, stands out. First, the documentary (screening at Slamdance) is about a family—the Circus Rosaire family, both human and animal. The director and DP Chad Wilson have been married for 10 years, in business together as the LA-based Progressive Productions for six.

Bliley had known the Rosaire family since she was 6 years old, so her five years of access to the family was an act of trust.

And then there was the edit. Bliley changing diapers in Zavistovski’s small apartment while the editor worked. When Zavistovski nursed Chloe, Bliley looked at cuts, or the three of them sat in front of the computer, Zavistovksi’s left hand around Chloe, right hand on the mouse. “Chloe didn’t sleep,â€? Bliley says, “she maybe napped a half hour a day—and that was my job, soothing her, begging her to sleep. She was so steeped in the sounds of the circus, the lions and tigers, the elephants, the monkeys, that those were some of her first words.â€? At a year old, Chloe sat rapt through the first screening, lulled by the familiar sounds of her own infancy. more…