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PARK CITY, UTAH — Like it has every morning for the past six days, the Sundance Film Festival's official yoga class begins at 8 a.m. at the Sundance House, a combination meeting room, café and Internet lounge located in the arts center on Main Street here. It's a cold midweek morning, and 15 or so people gather outside the center's locked doors while a festival volunteer fetches keys.
Inside, in a large room usually used for festival panel discussions and cocktail receptions, chairs are pushed to the side and replaced with yoga mats so class participants can stretch, bend and relax before the start of another hectic Sundance day. It takes only a few minutes before the cell phones start ringing.
This is the Sundance Film Festival, after all, where filmmakers, many of them first-timers, come to promote their films, generate buzz and hopefully sign a distribution deal. Yoga class or not, there's no escaping bleeping cell phones.
Gaze at the nearby snowcapped Wasatch Mountains. Walk through the faux mountain lodge hotel lobbies with their massive stone fireplaces, overstuffed chairs and espresso bars. Browse the gift stands and compare prices on winter clothes, ski hats and coffee mugs plastered with the Sundance Festival logo.
The Sundance image — created and promoted by its founder and chief ambassador, actor/director Robert Redford, over the past 23 years — is one of health, fitness, new-age beliefs and the mountainous outdoors.
It's a carefully manufactured spirit, a well-planned and branded mystique that festival attendees can buy in hotel lobbies or year round in the Sundance gift catalogue.
If you believe in the Sundance message — one of diverse, independent artists gathering in a scenic Utah ski town to celebrate their independently crafted film art — yoga and Sundance are likely partners.
If you don't buy into it — and this year Redford has attracted substantial criticism that Sundance is a slick, stylish, branded product no different from the many merchandise tie-ins scattered throughout Park City — the festival appears to have split personalities, one about grassroots film art and the other based on product placement.
Notable films
The Park City crowds reach an estimated 38,000 people over the festival's 10 days of movie screenings, interviews, photo ops and deal-making. For the people lining up outside the Eccles Theatre, the massive high school auditorium that serves as the main Sundance screening venue, the focus is on the most talked-about films here.
"I walked out of Saved (a comedy about kids at a religious camp, starring Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin)," says a young woman, one of 1,100 festival volunteers. "I walked into the lobby right past Mandy Moore, who turned to the person next to her and said, 'Why is that girl leaving?' I mean, I respect Mandy Moore, but I had to tell her, 'Your movie is awful.' "
In the Spanish-language drama Maria Full of Grace, first-time feature filmmaker Joshua Marston tells a taut story about Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a 17-year-old small-town Colombian girl who risks her life for the financial payoff as a "mule," someone who swallows pellets of heroin and travels to the United States to release the drugs to waiting dealers.
Matter-of-fact storytelling, an extraordinary performance from lead actress Moreno and beautiful photography courtesy of cameraman Jim Denault make Maria Full of Grace more immigrant melodrama than conventional drug trafficking thriller. By focusing on Maria's personal story, Marston shows where his storytelling heart lies.
Brazilian director Walter Salles, whose filmmaking career goes back to the 1998 Sundance debut of his drama Central Station, adapts the journals of Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his friend Dr. Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) into The Motorcycle Diaries, a visually rich, emotional and thoroughly engaging road movie.
Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student living with his family in Buenos Aires at the time, accompanies Granado on a journey through South America with little money and a worn Norton 500cc bike as their only means of transportation. Bernal, best known for his role in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and de la Serna, a newcomer to U.S. moviegoers, bond like true friends.
Everything about the film — its stunning photography, lead and supporting performances and heartfelt finale — comes together brilliantly. For Salles, The Motorcycle Diaries is a dazzling forward leap in his career.
Born into Brothels, a spirited documentary about the children of Calcutta's red light district from co-directors Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, powerfully portrays the life-by-any-means spirit of the prostitutes and their families. On one level, it's a sociopolitical film tackling the plight of the impoverished women forced into prostitution with a focus on the children in danger of following in their mothers' footsteps.
At the same time, the film tells the story of the non-profit arts group Kids With Cameras, which teaches the red light children how to take photographs in the hope of inspiring them to better lives. By following the individual children in the photography class, Kauffman and Briski bring inspiration to an overly familiar, depressing setting.
Napoleon Dynamite, the comedy from director and co-writer Jared Hess, is a surprisingly sweet take about high school geek Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), his friend Pedro (Efran Ramirez) and their struggle for acceptance in a small Idaho town. The audience's loud laughs, frequent and surprisingly heartfelt, are a testament to Hess' affection for everyday people and their modest lives.
Corporatization of Sundance
Just outside the Sundance House, home to the morning yoga classes as well as other festival activities, a VW Beetle is parked alongside a tent promoting the German automaker. Across the street, a local restaurant has been transformed into the Hewlett/Packard photo studio, where pictures of festival filmmakers and actors are taken and printed using the latest HP products.
Storefronts housing the Sky Martini lounge and the Turning Leaf wine bar are nearby on Main Street, where barricades extend the sidewalks to handle the large crowds. Further down the street sits the Village at the Lift, an elaborate two-story white tent that's home to parties, press conferences, interviews and stores promoting clothes and Fred Segal beauty products.
For the largest festival crowds — those overflowing mobs squeezing to get inside festival parties and hospitality suites featuring a variety of free gifts from Diesel jeans and FCUK clothes to Black & Decker home appliances — the merchandise is as important as the movies. Gift-grabbing has replaced skiing as the Sundance leisure activity of choice.
"I've made a list of the corporate sponsors at the festival," says Mark Achbar, co-director along with Jennifer Abbot of The Corporation, a documentary that uses recent corporate scandals as a means to examine the history of the corporation.
Achbar points to his scrap of paper and reads his list: "Coca-Cola, VW, Hewlett/ Packard. It's astounding."
The signs promoting Volkswagen and Coca-Cola Lime are more ubiquitous than the posters for the festival films. What's even more astounding is that a book is grabbing the early spotlight at the start of America's top film festival.
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, journalist Peter Biskind's warts-and-all history of American specialty cinema, was released two days prior to the start of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The impact of Redford being depicted unflatteringly in the book is felt immediately.
"Joining Harvey Weinstein at a book signing later," Redford tells the laughing crowd at the opening night screening of Riding Giants, documentary director Stacy Peralta's lush history of big wave surfing.
Over the opening weekend, thousands of filmmakers, actors and executives arrive in Park City. It remains to be seen if a festival film can match the hype of Biskind's must-read book.
There are times, looking across the crowds milling around the festival's sprawling hotel headquarters and waiting in line for various shuttle buses, that every copy of Down and Dirty Pictures has found its way here. The local bookstore sells out of two shipments, a total of around 120 copies. At one industry party, Down and Dirty Pictures is placed in the guests' goody bags.
Midway into the festival, early on Jan. 19, Redford makes his way to the extravagant Village at the Lift tent to give interviews in support of his new movie, The Clearing. The thriller from director Pieter Jan Brugge stars Redford as a kidnapped businessman facing off against his assailant (Willem Dafoe).
Festival crowds swarmed the Eccles Theatre the previous evening for the premiere of The Clearing. For Redford, the film marks a unique debut — it's the first film starring him to play at the Sundance Festival. (Redford also produced The Motorcycle Diaries.)
For many first-time filmmakers thrilled at the opportunity to be at Sundance, the criticism of the festival's famous poster boy fails to diminish the experience. The Sundance mystique is still new and exciting to them. Yet they know about the book and admit it's the one thing everyone's been talking about.
On the same day as the press interviews for The Clearing, an anti-Redford editorial appears in Daily Variety, the Hollywood trade newspaper that's distributed throughout the festival.
Dafoe joins Redford at the interview table with a small group of journalists from around the world. To no one's surprise, all the questions are directed at the Sundance founder.
As the film's beaten kidnap victim, Redford admits he's never looked so haggard before on screen, but that's key to the film's honesty. Asked if he feels uncomfortable appearing in a film in "his" festival, Redford says he has no reservations.
"I don't have anything to do with programming," he says. "I remember Geoff (Festival Director of Programming Geoff Gilmore) called to tell me he really liked the film and wanted it in the festival. I don't have a problem at all with it. I just want people to know I didn't shove it up their ass or down their throat."
As far as Biskind's book, Redford admits he hasn't read it but is well aware of its criticism against him and the festival he helped create.
"I know that he (Biskind) never contacted me for an interview," Redford says, before getting up to leave. "He may say that he tried to speak with me, but I don't know of any interview requests. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but this guy has never been to Sundance, which I think says something. He (Biskind) took a swipe at Sundance 10 years ago for a magazine article, and now he's back at it again. When you're successful, you open yourself up to criticism, and I think the festival is more organized, on firmer ground, better than ever."
'Just thrilled to be here'
No fresh snow has fallen since the start of the festival, and the January snow lining the Park City sidewalks is icy and blackened from dirt. Basically, the snow looks old and used.
The same feeling of overfamiliarity happens with movies. The documentary Word Wars, about a quartet of top-rated Scrabble players competing in the National Scrabble Tournament, strikes similar dramatic territory as last year's National Spelling Bee documentary Spellbound. The ensemble drama We Don't Live Here Anymore — starring Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo — is based on a short story by Andre Dubus, author of the story that inspired a past Sundance domestic drama, In the Bedroom. Actor Billy Bob Thornton plays an ex-con in search of redemption in Chrystal, a role similar to his character in the 2003 Sundance drama Levity.
Desperate to generate some attention around his solemn thriller Primer, director/writer Shane Carruth flaunts his debut film's miniscule budget. He likes to draw comparisons to director Robert Rodriguez, who debuted his no-budget action movie El Mariachi at Sundance.
Carruth sits on the couch of a hotel room with two cast members for a morning interview. A number of movies sold during a flurry of deals in the festival's opening weekend, but the word is still out on Primer. When told that most filmmakers are cautioned not to discuss low budgets in order to protect potential deals, Carruth laughs.
"I just want to be honest, and the fact is this film cost $7,000," he says. "I'm just thrilled to be here. I have no idea what to expect. Everything is a bonus. We shot this in Dallas with little help from anybody. There is no film community in Dallas.
"I'm in the film because, well, I don't have to pay myself. I edited the film on my computer, and I didn't use Final Cut Pro or the latest editing software because I couldn't afford it. Everything about the movie is bare bones. The most expensive thing we did was blow it up to 35mm."
Primer might be slightly derivative of Pi, another dark thriller about young scientists on the verge of discovery, a hit at Sundance in 1998. Yet Carruth's film claims an honest independent pedigree.
In the film, four young men work in a garage to build an ambiguous high-tech device. The mechanism is astounding in its results, and the men struggle to protect their secret from others.
The narrative is intentionally ambiguous. The non-descript landscape — a mishmash of large office parks, apartment complexes and self-storage businesses in North Dallas — becomes haunting and eerie.
A mysterious narrator adds to the film's complexity: "There was value in the thing, but what was it?" The boy scientists act as their own test subjects. Two large crates housed inside a self-storage container are the key items in the story. A bleeding ear hints at the danger lurking inside.
Primer is a movie made outside the Hollywood system as well as the New York independent film community, which means that Carruth is a self-declared emerging film artist with zero Hollywood connections.
"I tell everyone I shot the film for the price of a used car," he says, laughing.
Primer proves that the shift toward home moviemaking is now at a level sufficient to get a film into Sundance. The big metaphor for the movie is a folded ping-pong table in the garage, a scene that captures the film's homegrown spirit. The characters in Primer are average college-age American geeks, and perhaps the same is true for Carruth and his gang.
Granted, Primer begs the question of whether there are any new stories anymore, but its low-budget production proves that anyone from any city, no matter how far removed from Manhattan or Los Angeles, can make a movie good enough for Sundance.
A surprise winner
The first new snowfall of the festival arrives hours after the closing-night awards ceremony Jan. 24. The flash of white is just in time for people to leave town with a clean, wintry look at Park City.
At a festival thick with corporate sponsorships, celebrities and deal-making, the final night awards offer a much-needed climactic surprise.
Born into Brothels and Maria Full of Grace win Audience Awards, but all speculation about the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize flops when jury member Danny Glover reads the winning title: Primer. Carruth takes to the stage with a pair of his cast members, and he's clearly shocked by the announcement.
"I remember when this wasn't a Sundance film but a bunch of guys moving furniture in my parent's house," Carruth says, staring blankly at the audience and into the TV cameras broadcasting the ceremony for the Sundance Channel.
A number of films captured attention over their early deals, including The Motorcycle Diaries, Napoleon Dynamite, Riding Giants and the comedy Garden State, but it's Primer that claims the big critical win.
The pecking order for Carruth changes the moment he stands on the makeshift stage at the Park City Racquet Club and accepts the award. He's now part of the Sundance mystique, proving that dreams don't have to cost a fortune to make come true.
The story of Primer finally trumps Biskind's Sundance-bashing book when it comes to generating attention. A truly independent film becomes the festival's official "down and dirty picture," and Carruth has the elbow grease to prove it. ©
Read more on the film festival with Steve's Sundance Diaries.
