The 2012 Sundance Film Festival drew to a close over the weekend with a flurry of additional distribution deals, as well as a Saturday night awards ceremony. The fest’s out-of-nowhere buzz hit Beasts of the Southern Wild was among the big winners, nabbing not only the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, but the US Dramatic Excellence in Cinematography award. The Documentary Grand Jury Prize went to The House I Live In, an examination of the war on drugs from director Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight). The Israeli film The Law in These Parts won the World Cinema Jury Prize for Documentary, while the Latin American musical drama Violeta Went to Heaven won the Dramatic World Cinema Jury Prize.
True to my history of excellent scheduling judgment, your humble correspondent saw not one of those films during my eight days in Park City, though I did take in — and greatly enjoy — the US Audience award winners The Invisible War (Documentary) and The Surrogate (Drama); the latter film also won a richly-deserved US Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting. My favorite film of the fest, Mike Birbiglia’s warm, winning comedy Sleepwalk With Me, won the Best of NEXT Audience Award; another favorite, the wry time-travel comedy/drama Safety Not Guaranteed, won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
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PARK CITY, UT: Attendees of the Sundance Film Festival are expressing shock and sadness over the passing of independent film biz legend Bingham Ray, who suffered a pair of strokes over the past week and died today. He was 58.
Ray’s career in movies began humbly, as a projectionist at New York’s Bleecker Street cinema. In 1991, Ray and Jeff Lipsky co-founded October Films, which became one of the seminal independent film distributors of the 1990s; their slate included Lost Highway, Breaking the Waves, Secrets & Lies, and The Apostle. He later served as president of United Artists and was an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Ray was also the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society.
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Thanks to our friends at Yahoo!, nine of the short films that are screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival are now streaming online here for you to check out — and the one that gets the most votes wins a $5000 prize. Considering that it’s nearly 5pm on a Friday, what could you possibly have left to do that’s more important than helping out an emerging filmmaker? Also, not to play favorites, but we’re wondering how a film called “The Debutante Hunters” that focuses on the “more rugged side” of a group of “true southern belles” could fail to be anything but absolutely amazing. Thoughts? [via The Hairpin]
Tomorrow marks the opening day of the Sundance Film Festival, the annual winter movie orgy/buyer’s market/excuse to party for those who make, buy, watch, and act in independent films (or what passes for independent, in this IMAX 3-D superhero climate). Your humble film editor is traveling to Park City (for the first time) to take it all in: the swag, the hobnobbing, the VIP parties. Or he may just end up going to movies all day and staying up all night writing stuff about them. That’s probably a bit more likely.
Taking on the screening schedule is a bit daunting; the festival is screening 110 feature-length films from 31 countries, and, well, there’s only so many hours in the day. (If you think that’s heavy, it’s worth noting that the number of submissions was up to 4,042 films. Yikes.) But I think I’ve plucked out the cream of the crop; I’ll probably find out that I’m wrong, that the movie I missed to see the Sean-Penn-as-an-emo-Nazi-hunter movie (yes, that’s real) ends up winning the competition and getting picked up for $5 million by the Weinstein Company. But until that happens, here’s the ten Sundance films I’m most looking forward to.
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One of our most anticipated titles at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (oh, yeah, did we mention we’ll be at the Sundance Film Festival? Because we totes will) is Room 237, a new documentary by Rodney Ascher about the obsessive fans of The Shining. According to Entertainment Weekly, one of them posits an intriguing two-part conspiracy theory. First, he holds that Kubrick “directed” the faked Apollo moon landings while shooting 2001 — itself a mere cover for his bigger job. (This one’s been floating around for years — hell, it inspired its own “mockumentary,” Dark Side of the Moon.) But here’s the kicker: the fan also contends that, since Kubrick would have faced dire consequences if he ever revealed his involvement in the moon landing, he instead smuggled clues into The Shining, using his Stephen King adaptation as a giant coded message to tell the world about the ruse.
“It’s a film-nerd love-fest,” according to Sundance programmer Trevor Groth. “These obsessive people dissect The Shining, and they’ve watched it thousands of times, all finding their own coded meaning and language in it.” Reading about Room 237, and salivating for it, got us thinking about some of our other favorite “film-nerd love-fests”; after the jump, we’ve compiled ten of our favorite documentaries about famous films.
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The following journal is biased, personal, and anecdotal; it also has very little to say about movies, thought its subject is the Sundance Film Festival. What it offers is a transparent look into the experience of one of the people for whom Sundance was created: a talented young filmmaker with idiosyncratic stories to share, looking to bring those stories to a broader audience.
My younger sister’s short film, “The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting,” is an official selection in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. This is a thrill, an honor, and an opportunity. For many filmmakers, a short in Sundance is an exciting chance to build the relationships required — with producers, distributors, composers, festival programmers, investors — to take the next step in their careers. My sister wants to make a feature; we’re in Sundance to get closer to that goal. That’s the main thing you need to know.
The other thing you need to know is that the Sundance Film Festival, as a lived experience, is completely and totally nuts.
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Well, he can’t say he didn’t see them coming. The movie blogs are all over filmmaker Kevin Smith today, following the media event/premiere screening of his new film Red State at Sundance last night. Smith made plenty of enemies in the blogosphere last spring, when his studio buddy comedy Cop Out opened to some of the most scathing notices of the once-critical darling’s career. In a response not particularly notable for its maturity, Smith declared film critics irrelevant and vowed that he wasn’t letting critics see his films for free anymore. “Realized whole system’s upside down,” he tweeted. “So we let a bunch of people see it for free & they shit all over it Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week.”
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The Sundance Film Festival kicks off today in Park City, Utah, welcoming a crush of filmmakers, industry types, cinephiles, critics, paparazzi, and gift-bag hoarders for eleven days of film fun in the freezing cold. This year, Sundance will present 118 feature-length films, representing 29 countries by 40 first-time filmmakers. You’ll hear all about them in the days to come — the big premieres, the star Q&As, the breakouts, the flame-outs, the high dollar distribution deals. You might even hear about some good films! (Maybe.)
But most of us can only look over the slate longingly and leave it at that. This year and forevermore, we will never have the actual Sundance experience, for a variety of reasons: day jobs that get suspicious if you call in sick for eleven days in a row, pricey airline tickets, pricey festival passes, pricier accommodations (hotel rooms will run you at least a grand a night). Without a pretty healthy expense account, most of us are probably stuck having the Sundance experience in our living room.
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The Sundance Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, with indie film blogs and glossy TV entertainment new shows alike converging in Park City to spotlight this year’s crop of would-be Tarantinos. The narrative, of course, is that you make your independent film, get into Sundance, and wow the potential distributors, prompting a fierce bidding war, theatrical release, and rock-star treatment now and forevermore. (Though, as we discussed last week, the translation of Sundance buzz to box-office dollars isn’t always as easy as it looks).
But what of the thousands — literally, thousands, every year — of filmmakers who don’t make that brutal Sundance cut? For the filmmaker, that Sundance rejection letter can feel like nothing less than a death certificate for their labor of love. And while a spin at the ‘dance can certainly help an unknown film’s chances of breakout success (see Reservoir Dogs, The Blair Witch Project, El Mariachi, sex, lies, and videotape, and many more), there are plenty of Sundance rejects who found success anyway. Here’s just a few of them.
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Reservoir Dogs. sex, lies, and videotape. El Mariachi. Clerks. Slacker. The Blair Witch Project. Blood Simple. Napoleon Dynamite. Memento. Yes, the Sundance Film Festival (which kicks off less than a week from today) is the Holy Grail for aspiring indie filmmakers, who can rattle off those titles (and more) as examples of the wildest-dream scenario: Make a movie on the cheap, take it to the ‘dance, ignite a fierce bidding war, sell it to a scrappy and ingenious distributor with deep pockets, watch as they unleash it on the world, do big box office, become the next Tarantino or Soderbergh.
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