Category: News

What makes a film independent? Its financing? The edginess of the director’s vision? However you define indie film, the notion of being an outsider – because of a film’s content, or its production outside the studio system – is common to almost everyone’s definition of indie film, as Emanuel Levy points out in his 1999 book Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. But a number of movies in this year’s Festival lineup, in addition to being indie films, feature outsiders as characters, or the filmmakers are outsiders to the material they’re covering.
Take Matthew Bate, the Australian director of Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, which is screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Chaz Bono, the delightfully precocious child of Sonny and Cher, never felt comfortable as a woman. After spending most of his life trying to cope with an existence in a body that was never meant to be his, Chaz finally made the bold decision to undergo gender reassignment and share his journey to manhood in front of a camera crew. Becoming Chaz is the result, a film that starts out as a story about transition and eventually evolves into a true love story.

Fast becoming an expert in the fiction short-form, British filmmaker Daniel Mulloy makes his third appearance at the Festival this year, bringing with him the masterfully executed Baby. Mulloy previously premiered the BAFTA-winning short Antonio’s Breakfast at the 2006 Festival, and subsequently returned to Park City the next year with another short, Dad. Screening at the close of Shorts Program IV, his newest piece follows the alluring aftermath when a young woman intervenes in a mugging.

Miguel Arteta’s first trip to the Sundance Film Festival was in 1997 with his celebrated debut feature, Star Maps, a film that not only put the filmmaker on the map but joined a handful of other low budget features to kick-start a new era of American independent filmmaking. Arteta followed Star Maps with Chuck and Buck in 2000, an edgy character study starring Mike White and Chris Weitz. The film was another low-budget effort, and was shot on DV, and again, Arteta earned acclaim, this time for exploring the potential of digital video as a new tool for independent filmmakers, and for continuing to build his own highly personal filmmaking style.

Animator David OReilly isn’t exactly a new kid on the block. Sure, he’s considered up-and-coming, and his 1985 birth year doesn’t exactly qualify him as an age-old veteran. But instead of resting on his laurels after his 2010 short Please Say Something—which screened at the 2010 Festival, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and Grand Prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, among others—he’s hit the ground running with another edgy, twisted, hysterical follow-up venture, The External World, and has graduated quickly from the moniker of “kid” to something a bit more seasoned .

Sundance may be synonymous with American independent cinema, but in recent years the Institute has made far-ranging commitments to going global. The inaugural recipients of the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award were announced on Tuesday at the Sundance House Presented by HP at Kimball Arts Center, drawing mid-Festival fanfare for an ambitious partnership between the American nonprofit and one of India’s largest corporations. “We’re always looking to discover more about the world through film, and where the film communities are flourishing,” said Alesia Weston, associate director of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program.

It’s the Wednesday of the Festival. This is when most of us filmmakers relax. Our films have all screened.

Whenever a movie star moves behind the camera to direct, expectations always seem to be both great and small. A high profile brings an outsized level of interest, but also a suspicion of vanity, that a pretty face is straining to be taken seriously. But then there are the actor’s actors, the kinds of professionals for whom the transition seems completely natural and inevitable.

From the way Hollywood deals with matters of faith, you’d think it was a closed case. Either belief is passively assumed, an unchallenged fact of existence—think of all those hackneyed, string-scored, skyward-glancing, safely vague happy endings—or it’s something to be feared and vilified. In other words: inspirational treacle or horror.

While the film’s title will no doubt cause many a pulse to quicken in anticipation of another sensual bloodbath by gorgeous, misunderstood creatures of the night, Vampire is a film that skillfully transcends current sensationalism and the growing public obsession with vampires. At times the film even takes a sideways, humorous look at a cultural phenomenon that is more often laughable than significant, but Vampire is by no means a retelling of the same old story. Set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, the story focuses immediately on Simon, a nondescript and seemingly ordinary high school teacher who has a penchant for not only drinking human blood, but also aiding in the suicide of willing young women and then taking their essence home in jars.

Last year’s Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Short Film went to Drunk History: Douglass and Lincoln, the latest chapter in an online comedy series in which famous actors re-enact historical accounts from intoxicated narrators.

There’s never been a film quite like Bengali Detective. It has the jack-of-all-eclecticism of a big budget Bollywood musical—part detective story, part underdog yarn, part ensemble city tale—except for one unlikely detail: it’s all real. “It’s always been a dream of mine to make a documentary that could step into genre,” says Phil Cox, a 36-year-old Londoner whose second feature is a long way from the embedded combat reporting that established him as a filmmaker to watch (Cox’s reports from Darfur, broadcast on Channel 4, are credited with alerting the world to the genocide crisis there).