Sundance is the film festival that made hits of Reservior Dogs, Once and the searing drama Precious, which comes to Irish cinemas next Friday. DONALD CLARKElooks at the Utah festival's 30-year identity crisis and the movies likely to impress there this weekend "Then Steven Soderbergh brought Sex Lies & Videotape . . . Within a few years, Sundance had become the site of savage bidding wars for whichever film seemed to best encapsulate the coming zeitgeist
JUST UNDER A year ago, a little film called Push won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature at the Sundance Film Festival. As is often the case with this award - consider recent winners such as
Forty Shades of Blue
,
Padre Nuestro
or
Three Seasons
- this thing called
Push
was barely heard of again. Was this further proof that the indie jamboree in snowy Utah had become an embarrassing irrelevance?
Of course not. To avoid confusion with a recent science fiction film, Pushwas renamed (deep breath) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphireand went on to become one of the most lauded American films of 2009. The only film ever to win the top prizes at both Sundance and Toronto film festivals, Lee Daniels's searing drama, following an obese African-American girl's traumas in 1980s Harlem, went on to average a stunning $100,000 per cinema in its limited release. It opens here next week.
Consider also the case of John Carney's Once. The director is in little doubt that winning the audience prize at Sundance propelled his delightful musical towards stellar reviews, a worldwide release and, ultimately, an Oscar for best original song.
"Wining the audience award was key," Carney confirms. "We didn't seal the deal on North American distribution till then. That confirmed people's feelings about the film. They knew it wasn't just hype."
This year Ken Wardrop, the highly praised young Irish director, will be taking his quirky documentary His & Hersto Utah.
As Sundance 2010 grinds into action - the event began yesterday and runs until January 31st - we must, thus, conclude that it is still good for something. So why do so many people groan and cast their eyes to heaven when the festival is mentioned?
Interestingly, the complaints come from two contradictory standpoints. Firstly, many argue that a festival set up to encourage independent cinema has become totally engulfed by the mainstream. The first sighting of Paris Hilton at the event seemed to confirm this dire view. Even Robert Redford, Sundance founder and continuing figurehead, felt moved to comment on the heiress's presence. "Paris Hilton and so forth doesn't have anything to do with anything," old Blondie said before going on to boast about the festival's relaxed atmosphere.
To be fair, as John Carney confirms, Sundance is, indeed, still a degree less formal than the average Hollywood carnival.
"Everyone is authentically interested in films there," John says. "You have to queue for films unless you buy this hugely expensive pass. So, from time to time, you'll find Harvey Weinstein or other, quite famous people queuing to see a movie. They still pride themselves on being a cineastes' festival."
Is it, then, little toohigh-minded? Far from taking the line that Sundance is overly in thrall to business, some more profit-hungry commentators point accusingly towards the array of film-makers who have won top prizes and then faded into obscurity. For every Steven Soderbergh or Todd Haynes there are a dozen frustrated winners such as Alexandre Rockwell, Victor Nuñez or Tom Noonan. So, depending upon your view, Sundance is either too commercial or not commercial enough.
In truth, these discussions have been taking place since the festival's inception. In 1978, three associates of Redford, eager to bring film-makers to the Beehive State, set up an event named the Utah/US Film Festival in Salt Lake City. Over the next decade, Redford's Sundance Institute, a body established to encourage and mentor young film-makers, became increasingly involved with the festival and, in 1981, the event moved to the ski resort of Park City.
It was not until 1991 that the shindig formally changed its title to the Sundance Film Festival, but, by then, it had already become a key player in the debate about where independent cinema was heading.
Think back to 1989. By this point, the American gunslingers of the early 1970s - Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, Pakula - were entering middle-age and, following the rise of the Spielbergian blockbuster, Hollywood seemed more conservative than ever. Meanwhile, a few rare successes aside, independent cinema remained the preserve of 16mm experimentalists and exploitation merchants.
Up in twee, faux-cowboy Park City, the US Film Festival was failing to make any sort of mark. John Powers, writing at the time in Film Comment, explained that the event was more interesting for the skiing than the films and that independent cinema - too taken up with the weedy and the wistful - had "settled into a complacent mediocrity".
Then Steven Soderbergh brought Sex Lies & Videotapeto the festival and the weather changed. With My Left Footalso in his sights, Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax Studios, snapped up the sly sex comedy and set about turning independent cinema into a viable commercial business. Within a few years, Sundance had become the site of savage bidding wars for whichever film seemed to best encapsulate the coming zeitgeist.
Three years after Sex Lies & Videotapewon the Sundance audience award, Park City had become a vital staging point for the launch of any vaguely off-beam film project. Yet Redford's somewhat conservative artistic mindset still determined the tone of the programming. In 1992, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogsarrived in Utah and confounded a great many pundits. Surely, they reasoned, we serious cineastes had come to the icy retreat to get away from films about guns and disembowelments. That was mainstream Hollywood's business. Independent cinema should be about pale youths in woolly hats discussing unwanted pregnancy.
At that year's festival, two fine thrillers -- Nick Gomez' Laws of Gravityand Carl Franklin's One False Move- were turned down because, well, Redford already had one of these horrid shooty things.
"They didn't want to have two gun movies there?" Tarantino later said, aghast. "I'd buy that if they didn't have six gay movies there. They should have changed the name to the Sundance Gay and Lesbian Film Festival."
In the Soup, Alexandre Rockwell's wry comedy, won that year's Grand Jury Prize and the majority of the remaining awards went to similarly placid, typically quirky entertainments. But Tarantino and Miramax - Weinstein got into the Quentin business good and early - ended up winning the argument. From then on, independent producers remained as open to twists on genre cinema as they were to more traditional art-house material. Sundance negotiations became even more frenzied. Everyone was now on the hunt for the next Tarantino.
What happened, sadly, was that the festival became an event where commercially minded debut film-makers, dabbling reluctantly in indie cinema, sought to launch mainstream careers. Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, a Sundance hit in 1994, views the awarding of the Jury Prize to Ed Burns's distinctly ordinary The Brothers McMullen as a significant moment. "Ed Burns and The Brothers McMullen was the beginning of the end," he said. "It was a movie that absolutely could have been made by a studio. It had as much edge as vanilla ice cream."
That was way back in 1995. Smith does have a point. Over the intervening decade-and-a-half, Sundance did get ever more eaten up by a passion for easily digestible crossover hits.
Yet, as John Carney or Lee Daniels would undoubtedly agree, this singular film festival does still matter. Don't bet against another small classic emerging over the next week.
Precious opens next Friday
Hot prospects for Sundance 2010
Given that Sundance has become so taken up with debut features - or, at least, films by unknowns - it is hard to pick out highlights from any year's programme.
Nonetheless, a few titles do standout from the 2010 list. Top of the heap is satirist Chris Morris's potentially delicious Four Lions. Set among a cadre of British jihadists, the picture will, according to Morris - creator of Brasseye - do for that movement what Dad's Army did for the Nazis.
Alex Gibney, director of the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, returns with a documentary about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. James Franco stars as a strangely gorgeous Allen Ginsberg in a biopic of the poet entitled (inevitably) .
Sympathy for Delicious, directorial debut of actor Mark Ruffalo, is a study of a disabled DJ who becomes involved with faith healing. Kristen Stewart somehow found time between Twilight episodes to film two interesting-sounding features. In Welcome to the Rileys she plays a 16-year-old prostitute involved with a middle-aged man played by James Gandolfini. In The Runaways, a study of that post-punk band, she has a crack at a young Joan Jett.
Duosyllabic high-concept thrillers are not in short supply: in Frozen, three skiers get stuck on a chairlift; in , Ryan Reynolds is, well, buried. But the most attractive title for genre fans looks like Vincenzo Natali's , in which the director of Cube attempts a genetic engineering horror.
All this and we haven't (until now) mentioned our own Ken Wardrop's His & Hers.
