Sundance Film Festival Report, Part 1

The Sundance Film Festival, the annual year-in-film kickoff event slash showcase and marketplace for American Independent Film (whatever that is) is underway in Park City Utah. L contributor Danielle DiGiacomo is there, and will be reporting periodically on the film and the scene. Here is her first dispatch, covering the opening weekend. More to follow in the coming days.

Although calling the festival Sundance seems to be a cruel joke, as IceDance, Frostbite Dance, or My Toes Are Going To Turn Black and Fall Off Dance is more accurate, the quality of films at Sundance cannot be denied. After the first day of press and industry screenings — two documentary features and two narrative shorts — I felt refreshed, transported, and invigorated. And ready to hit the frozen drag that is Main Street to navigate the cocktail party circuit (stopping briefly to pose in front of pink-haired blogger Perez Hilton).

First up – Chang Yung's Up the Yangtze (pictured), which also happened to be the first film officially acquired at Sundance, with Zeitgeist Films picking up the theatrical rights. Chang tracks the impact of China's rapid industrial development by following two young people about to be displaced by the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which is poised to be the biggest hydroelectric power plant in the world. Gorgeously shot and meditatively paced, Up the Yangtze is an astounding and relevant film that deserves to be seen on a big screen.

Beginning with a close up of a razor sheering the long hair off of a young Russian boy, Alexandra Westmeier's Alone in Four Walls offers one of the most aestheticized portraits of bleakness I've seen since, well, last year, when I was blown away by Glaswegian Andrea Arnold's psycho-drama Red Road. Also edited by Westmeier, the documentary follows young men, all younger than fourteen, who are serving time in a juvenile detention center. Silent sequences of the boys making boxes, doing exercises in the yard, and making their beds are meticulously framed and edited, and Westmeier is correct in her decision to focus her camera for nearly uncomfortable periods of time on the boys' faces, letting us intuit their interiors. She focuses on the backstory of just a few of the boys, whose past lives are mired by such poverty and tragedy that we can assume similar circumstances for all the inmate/students. Crimes range from multiple murders to stealing bread to feed the family, and the director does not let the boys off the hook; in one case, she interviews the mother of one of their victims, and does not allow us to oversympathize with the only mildly regretful perpetrator, whose father and callous mother are also interviewed. Yet we still end up feeling an overall sadness and almost love for them, in all their weakness and desperation, despite the fact that we are left knowing that most of them will murder, steal, or assault again.

A respite from Eastern European bleakness came in the form of two short films, Matthew Lessner's hilariously accurate French New Wave mock-up, By Modern Measure, and Daniel Rabinowitz's My Olympic Summer, a hybrid of home video, voiceover, and historical footage that explores the breakdown of his own marriage through the lens of his parents' early relationship. Up in the next few days – a documentary on Roman Polanski and The Guitar, written by Amos Poe and directed by Robert Redford's daughter, Amy.