While being a programmer for the Sundance Film Festival may seem like a dream job, watching the 3,624 features and 5,107 shorts that were submitted this year is no walk in the park. From the submissions this year – the largest number in the Festival’s history – programmers selected 122 features and 84 shorts to screen at the 2008 Festival.

“Programming the Sundance Film Festival is not a matter of satisfying any pre-conceived agenda,” said Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore. “It’s a matter of responding to the work that’s submitted. It’s a process that demands a range of responses to the work and an openness to the diversity of American independent and international film. The kind of cinema that falls under that umbrella changes every year, so each year we challenge ourselves again to be open to all of the different kinds of work that we see.”

“I’ll tell you, it’s hard to select 122 features,” said Director of Programming John Cooper. “Think about it. Most people find 10 films a year. They all have the top 10 lists. We have to find 122 films that we’re in essence standing behind. Not every programmer loves every film in the Festival, but we stand behind every film as a team because we’re committed to a diversity of viewpoints and we believe in our process.”

Gilmore, Cooper, and their colleagues Caroline Libresco, Trevor Groth, Shari Frilot, David Courier, and John Nein face this monumental task on an annual basis and, yes, they watch every single film. Along with their team of more than 75 first-round screeners and several members of Sundance Institute, the diligent group goes into lock down during the crunch time of October through November. Led by Groth, the Festival’s shorts team of George Elrod, Todd Luoto, Shane Smith, Hebe Tabachnik, Kimberly Yutani, and Matt Anderson sift through thousands of submissions over the course of two months. The experience of viewing scores of films and engaging in heated debates can sometimes lead to tears. “It is emotional,” said Cooper. ““We’re passionate with each other. You get cut off from the world when you’re doing this job.”

While the programmers are alike in their passion for cinema, they bring a wide variety of perspectives to the table. Everyone weighs in on all categories of programming, but they do have areas of special focus and expertise. Libresco studied religion and has a political sensibility that lends itself to international films and documentary, Nein has a knack for analyzing story structure that is an asset in evaluating world features, and Frilot’s Harvard physics degree and background in the 1990s New York art scene make her a natural to oversee the experimental installations of the New Frontier program.

“I have a hard time with bad acting,” said Cooper, who used to work as a theatre director. “But Shari, she can get into the ideas behind a film, and that can propel her through. Trevor started as a volunteer for me when I just started out here. He was a driver, and we started talking about film. And I believe that if people are good at this, they’re good at it. If they’ve got it, they’ve got it.” Groth, who programs features in addition to overseeing the shorts program, has a natural sense of the zeitgeist and was one of the earliest advocates of films like Napoleon Dynamite.

The programmers use the fact that they are a group with distinct aesthetic interests and personalities to ensure that every film gets a fair shake. If one programmer doesn’t personally respond to a film but knows that another programmer might, the film ends up in the hands of the person most likely to appreciate it. “When you love a film, and you’re not sure that everybody else is going to love that film, you pass it on to the person who you also think might love it to support that film with you,” said Courier. Added Groth: “I learned early on ... that to make the process rewarding for me, you have to find what’s good in every film that you’re watching. So you’re looking for what’s good ... instead of just trying to find the faults in all of these films.”

“Ultimately, we’re looking for originality, diversity, and risk-taking in cinema,” said Gilmore. “And our responses to the work come from some combination of our gut reactions, and also our minds and our hearts.”

With 58 first-time directors screening their work this year, the Festival is firmly rooted in discovering new talent. “I have the little hairs on the back of my neck that raise when I watch a movie,” Frilot said, “when I see something that I haven’t seen before or I see a voice that I haven’t heard before or something that speaks to me personally.”

Many of this year’s selections tackle tough subjects like border tensions, poverty, the national debt, the war, and environmental disaster. But the films often take a humorous, hopeful, personal approach that makes them coping strategies for the new millennium. “One of the things you notice this year was that it’s not so much a question of solution as much as it is just kind of coping and mitigating,” said Nein. “And there’s a messiness to the films, which feels as though you’ve seen some aspect of life conveyed but not given some tidy ending that we know doesn’t actually really exist very often. And I really appreciated that about the films. I see that as a measure of sophistication and fidelity to life.”

The organic and collective process of creating the Festival program ends with the final decisions made by Gilmore. While the majority of this year’s submissions didn’t make the lineup, calling the filmmakers whose films did is one of the most thrilling and emotional parts of the programmers’ job. Cooper got teary-eyed as he remembered a stoic young man who nearly drove his car off the road and crashed when he heard the news. Libresco smeared her eye makeup reminiscing about a director who was bra shopping when she received the call and asked if she could share the news with the sales lady. “I said yes!” Libresco recalled.