Category: News

Taking a step (or two) that is new, the team behind James Franco’s installation Three’s Company: The Drama premiered a cheekily re-enacted episode from the beloved 70s sitcom at last night’s opening party for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. The four-wall projection installation normally features doctored and sonically remixed footage from the actual show, but this special screening featured Franco and company in slapdash drag, reinterpreting the show’s broad comedic dialogue as a breathless, self-serious soap opera. A small crowd crammed into a shoebox replica of Jack Tripper’s living room, spilling into the adjoining exhibits to complement the haphazard, impromptu spirit of the film, which stars an asymmetrically blonde Franco as Jack, a bearded man (Tyler Danna) as short-shorts-wearing Chrissy, and Franco’s own assistant, Dana Morgan, as Janet.

An effective film score moves seamlessly with a film’s images, imitating the ebb and flow of a film’s tone, or offering a restless, vibrant counterpoint to it. We usually think that a film score goes about its job without thrusting itself to the forefront—except for when it does, and even then, it’s still augmenting the story, involving the viewer more deeply in the experience of a film. But music can often be overlooked at a film festival.

The great (and rough) thing about the Festival is the total immersion of films and events over 10 days in the sun and snow. Great for your soul, rough on the body. Here’s some stuff from what I think was the last 24 hours.

What’s the most casual, intimate, stimulating, and surprising setting to have a conversation with the people behind the films of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival? Each morning at 10:00 a.m. at Filmmakers Lodge, Cinema Café Presented by Chase Sapphire gathers up a couple of interesting folks to chat about interesting things.

As I gear up for another Sundance Film Festival, it brings back memories of my time at the 2007 Composers Lab (this year more than the previous years I’ve been to the Festival because Circumstance, the film I worked on during the Lab, is a U.S. Dramatic Competition entry).

In the moments before the 2011 Sundance Film Festival officially launched with the annual Day One press conference at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, two Festival employees stood sentry at either side of the stage, anticipating the arrival of Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford, Executive Director Keri Putnam, and Festival Director John Cooper. Framed by the theatre’s neo-Egyptian proscenium and dressed in the Fest’s chic, Kenneth Cole-designed royal blue ski vests, the microphone-toting gentlemen inadvertently embodied a Festival preceded by a rich history, outfitted for the future, and eager to get on with the present.
With a record six films in this year’s U.

You may be aware that the Sundance Film Festival couldn’t operate without the army of volunteers who make it possible to produce the Festival every year. Anyone who’s been uncertain about which shuttle bus to board, which line to stand in at a Festival venue, or attended a Festival screening has been helped by a Festival volunteer.
The numbers behind the Festival’s volunteer operations are impressive, despite the ubiquity of the volunteers during the Festival: there are 1,650 volunteers at this year’s Festival, about 350 different kinds of jobs those volunteers need to do, and approximately 5,000 shifts that need to be filled during the 10 days of the Festival.

A veteran of both the Sundance Film Festival as well as Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, accomplished short filmmaker Moon Molson marks his return to the Festival this year with the world premiere of Crazy Beats Strong Every Time. This hefty character study follows a night in the life of an African-American twenty-something suddenly saddled with the burden of dealing with his deadbeat stepfather who has abruptly come back into his life by way of passing out drunk in the hallway of their housing project. Molson credits the inspiration for the subject matter “from some of the people I grew up with.

Five and a half years ago, as she began writing the script that became Pariah, Dee Rees was coming out to her family. Like the family of 17-year-old Alike in Pariah, Rees’s parents aren’t accepting of her sexuality. During the Festival, audiences may speak of Pariah as a coming-out movie, a film in which Alike (Adepero Oduye) realizes her potential when she makes the decision to reveal what everyone may have already guessed about her.

The movie geeks were out in force Friday morning at the Filmmaker Lodge, drawn there by the irresistible siren song that was the inaugural Cinema Café of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Sure, the couches are comfy, and the good folks at Chase Sapphire are providing coffee and snacks all Fest long, but the real draw was two icons of outsider cinema. We’re talking legendary writer-producer-director-impresario of the insane Roger Corman — subject of the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel — screening in the Park City at Midnight showcase, and peerless actor-human dynamo Rutger Hauer, who appears in two films at this year’s Festival, Hobo With a Shotgun and The Mill & The Cross.

Although Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper explained at yesterday’s Day One press conference that 2011 is the first year that films from all of the Festival’s competition sections kicked off the 10-day celebration, Thursday night was more bustling than ever, with films from the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary competitions, along with one program of shorts.

New for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival is the Native Showcase, focusing attention on an emerging generation of Native American and Indigenous filmmakers. The program, which includes Billy Luther’s second feature film, a documentary titled GRAB, and a collection of seven shorts, gets its own place in the spotlight this year.
Native and Indigenous films have been well represented in the Festival’s Dramatic Competition sections over the past several years, and this year is no exception with Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s On the Ice, which will screen in the U.