Sundance Wrap-Up: The Winners and The Overlooked

A day or two after I arrived in Park City for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I found myself chatting with a documentary director at a party. As he explained, he was taking a detour from a year-long festival tour promoting his second major doc, which had premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, only to be overshadowed by some of the more star-studded projects on the program. "I mean, we got enough press," the director told me. "But Toronto is a festival where it's still possible to play under the radar. Unlike Sundance."

I had that conversation in my head as I tackled about 20 of the 125 features at this year's festival. As even the most casual follower of the film industry knows by now, Sundance has become a famously buzz-driven affair. About 75 percent of the media who attend the festival concentrate on the dozen or so films that screen in the non-competitive "Premieres" sidebar. These are usually Hollywood-financed pictures with an A- or B-list star and/or director; they tend to be the objects of bidding wars if they don't go into the Festival with distribution already secured. This means that the 125 additional films on the schedule have to fight an uphill battle to gain any visibility. In past years, the competitive Jury Awards have served as a corrective to this problem. In 2006, for instance, while Little Miss Sunshine soaked up the lion's share of headlines and distribution funds, a three-part marvel of personal, truly independent filmmaking called Iraq in Fragments quietly bagged three Jury awards. And just last week, the same production secured an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. For a film largely shot and edited by one man on a low six-figure budget, that's about as successful as you can get.

This year, the four Juries divided their accolades evenly between small "issue films" and heavily-hyped acquisition bait. Whilst Grace is Gone, the first big sale of the festival, went home with the Dramatic Audience prize as well as the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize, the World Dramatic Jury prize went to Sweet Mud, a story of life on an Israeli kibbutz that both press and Festival goers had all but ignored. Other major jury prizes went to the Afghani elections doc Enemies of Happiness (Grand Jury Prize, World Documentary) and immigration drama Padre Nuestro (Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic).

To say that many of these films were not exactly the hottest tickets of the fest would be an understatement. But Jury Prize winners rarely are. It's not that Sundance 2007 was badly programmed; of the 20 features I saw in their entirety, only two were really awful, and seven films fell somewhere between Very Good and Undeniably Great. What's interesting, I think, is that the very best films I saw at Sundance 2007 were almost completely overlooked by the Festival press corps. And since many of them screened in the somewhat marginal Spectrum sidebar, they were ineligible for profile-boosting awards. Three dramatic features are worth singling out for their formal innovation, their fresh perspective, their directors' willingness to take risks....and for the fact that each project left Sundance without distribution.

On The Road With Judas

I seem to stand alone in praise of J.J. Lask's debut feature, based on his novel of the same name. The film essentially crashed and burned at its sole Sundance press screening; unable or unwilling to follow the film's Charlie-Kauffman-on-crack structural convolutions, about half of the packed crowd walked out long before the end. Admittedly, it takes about 30 minutes to figure out what the hell Lask is up to. The film is structured around a talk show called Let's Do Drinks, wherein a slimy host (played by J.J. Lask) welcomes guest J.J. Lask (played by Kevin Corrigan) to talk about his book, On The Road to Judas. The book in turn revolves around a master thief/David Lee Roth superfan who builds a criminal empire reselling stolen Apple IIcs. Characters from the book stop by the show to chat, as do the actors who play those characters in On The Road to Judas, the movie.

Undoubtedly, the whole enterprise is self-indulgent as hell. It's also intermittently dazzling, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly precise in its deconstruction of the narcissism inherent in creativity. It doesn't always work, but it's a blast to watch even when it fails.

Low and Behold (pictured)

Just as experimental in its methods, Low and Behold is apparently the first fiction feature to deal with life in post-Katrina New Orleans. Director Zach Godshall and co-writer/producer/star Barlow Jacobs incorporate documentary footage into a fictional tale of insurance adjusters in the devastated city. Jacobs plays Turner Stull, a blank-eyed young white guy who moves down to NOLA to evaluate storm damage under the tutelage of his carpetbagging uncle. Forced to traverse an unfamiliar city in which simple signposts and landmarks have been erased, making a living by delivering bad news to a seemingly endless stream of justifiably angry folks, Turner strikes up an uneasy friendship with an enigmatic black man named Nixon. This unlikely pair spends the bulk of the film driving around, attending to Turner's insurance appointments and searching for Nixon's lost dog. Their convergent quests may be a little too convenient. Yet the set-up works. The actors, particularly Robert Longstreet as Turner's uncle, are continuously engrossing, and the survivor interviews never fail to astound. Though less interested in mounting an investigation or assigning blame, Low and Behold is just as affecting as Spike Lee's Where The Levees Broke--sometimes more so.

Great World of Sound

Robert Longstreet also pops up in Great World of Sound, cast as yet another opportunistic shyster looking to exploit the gaps between good intentions and greed. Written and directed by Craig Zobel (who pays the bills producing reality shows such as The Apprentice), it's a nuanced tale of manipulation and sacrifice, set within a sham record company--think American Idol meets Glengarry Glen Ross. Pat Healy and Kene Holliday play middle-aged guys with thin resumes who jump at the chance to work as record producers. They manage to sustain their semi-naive enthusiasm even after learning that the job requires them to con "down payments" out of prospective artists. The director placed ads in real newspapers and surreptitiously filmed the auditions from behind a two-way mirror. The result is a film that strips away the blooper aspect from the talentless talent audition; in Zobel's eyes, bad singers are too desperate and sad to be good for an easy laugh.