“To be very honest, I’ve had a growing love affair with cinema,” says New York-based Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat, who brings her first feature film project, Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan),to the Festival this year. “Part of it is the form and the power of storytelling and narrative,” she says, “but it’s also the relationship cinema has to its audiences. It’s very, very powerful.
Jay and Mark Duplass radiated giddy exuberance from the stage of the Eccles Theatre before the Saturday evening premiere of their film, Cyrus. The filmmaking brothers got their start in the ultra-low-budget, uber-indie “mumblecore” genre, and seemed genuinely thrilled to arrive at Sundance 2010 as a couple of Festival darlings.Cyrus stars John C.
No one could believe me when I said I had never seen Harold and Maude. I honestly don’t know either how it slipped by me. It’s the perfect film for me: about how life is so amazing and at times so horrible that you have to seize every minute.
Bad news. A film set in the 1980s is a now considered a period film. Director Anthony Burns and writer Brandon Freeman came to that conclusion fairly easily when setting Skateland in early ’80s East Texas.
Critically acclaimed actor Anthony Mackie plays Marcus in Night Catches Us, a beautifully directed drama by first-time feature director Tanya Hamilton, who also wrote the script. Set in Philadelphia in 1976 just after the height of the Black Power movement, the story opens with Marcus’s return to the city he left mysteriously several years earlier, and gradually reveals the complex emotional and political reasons behind his departure. As the story unfolds, we witness the brutality and racism of local police, who act with impunity.
Hungry for art with your food? Wonder where your food comes from? As part of the Sundance Film Festival New Frontier program, farmer and visual artist Matthew Moore will have a video installation in the Park City Fresh Market grocery store, showing the long trek your food has been on to reach your mouth.
Moore is a fourth generation farmer, working on the family farm west of Phoenix, AZ, land his grandfather started plowing in the 1920s. Like a lot of teenagers desperate for a change, he left the farm after high school.
Adrian Grenier, the charming and exceptionally photogenic leading man on HBO’s Entourage, has made a living both on and off the screen as a paparazzi darling. But after being accosted and admittedly bemused by the relentless camera of 13-year-old Austin Visschedyk, Grenier decided to turn the tables on the star-shooting youth and find out what makes a true paparazzo click. His second documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, was the result, and even Grenier was surprised by the journey he and Austin took together.
From the inbred freaks of The Hills Have Eyes to the cannibalistic rednecks of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the hillbilly murderer is a familiar archetype of the horror genre.But what if instead of being the killer, the hillbilly was actually the good guy for once? This role reversal is the jokey premise of Eli Craig’s feature film debut, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a satirical take on horror movies that pits two bumbling rednecks against a pack of mean-spirited college kids.
Director and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener reveals the subtleties of relationships in Please Give—a story of love, guilt, and humanity. When Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a Manhattan married couple with an estate-sale furniture store buy their neighbor’s apartment, they need to wait for the occupant, Andra (Ann Guilbert), to actually die before they can tear down the walls to expand their home. An impromptu birthday dinner for Andra and her grown granddaughters (Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall) plants the seeds for complicated relationships between the two families, in which all are faced with issues of their own morality and Kate and Alex confront their “liberal guilt,” which they’ve been at pains to navigate.
Daddy Longlegs is the funny, compassionate, and somewhat troubling Safdie brothers’ portrait of Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), who may be the most irresponsible father in recent cinematic history.
Lenny’s young sons, Sage and Frey (Sage and Frey Ranaldo), get to be with their father two weeks out of the year. Lenny is a projectionist at a Manhattan movie theater who is a loving, thoughtful father but one who’s more than a little misguided (like the time he can’t find anyone to keep his boys, so he crushes a sleeping pill and gives them part of it, thus putting them in stage four sleep for several days).
For three emerging filmmakers, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival represents both a triumphant return and an auspicious beginning. Directors David Michôd, Spencer Susser, and Ken Wardrop all presented acclaimed short films at the 2008 Festival, and remarkably all have returned just two years later with debut features. But for each, the transition to features is less of a graduation than an expansion of an already well-established personal vision.
Have you seen a Duplass brother yet? If not, give it a minute. The writing/directing duo of The Puffy Chair and Baghead (Sundance 2008) will be a presence not only via their new film Cyrus but are exec producers of Bryan Poyser’s Lovers of Hate. Mark also executive-produced Bass Ackwards and The Freebie.