Authors — Jason Guerrasio

“8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION” | director, Reed Cowan

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 2:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The hardest decision for me was getting well with the fact that the entire film goes up against everything I was ever taught. To not question the leader of the church of my birth. To not point a critical view in the direction of the religion I was always taught to be the ONLY true religion on the planet and the ONLY way to attain the highest level of Heaven. We are the product of our cultures, and shedding the fear that was ingrained in my psyche was […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2010
“12th & DELAWARE” | directors, Rachel Grady & Heidi Ewing

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] 12th & Delaware takes place over one year on a single street corner in coastal Florida. On one side of the street stands an abortion clinic. On the other a pro-life operation whose single objective is to persuade women who are considering abortion to continue with the pregnancy. We discovered these pro-life organizations (known as crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs) while filming Jesus Camp, and to our knowledge no filmmaker had unveiled the goings-on of any of the 4,000 such places in the United States. CPCs represent the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2010
“WASTE LAND” | director, Lucy Walker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 3:00 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] In Star Trek there’s the “prime directive,” Starfleet’s code of noninterference. What do filmmakers abide by? Should documentaries interfere with their subjects’ lives? But how could they not? I don’t believe in objectivity. I observe the observer’s paradox every moment I’m filming. Your presence is changing everything; there’s no mistaking it. And when you’re climbing Everest with eight blind people (as I did for my last film Blindsight) there is no acceptable margin for mistakes. So now when the artist Vik Muniz and I were conceiving […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2010
“THE DRY LAND” | writer-director, Ryan Piers Williams

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] I was born and raised in Texas and have a strong loyalty to the state. One thing I’ve known since I was a child is that while they may appear to be similar, New Mexico and Texas might as well be Venus and Mars. The Dry Land’s characters, setting and nuances are all rooted in Texas. However the lack of substantial tax incentives in Texas made it very difficult to argue for a Texas shoot. With this in mind my financiers pushed for me to consider shooting in […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2010
“WINNING TIME: REGGIE MILLER VS. THE NEW YORK KNICKS” | director, Dan Klores

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 24, 11:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] My film takes place in the basketball arena of the early-to-mid 1990s. I listened to hundreds of hip-hop songs and fell in love with a few. But I always felt Reggie Miller was a performance artist, and Madison Square Garden/New York City was his Carnegie Hall. Therefore I decided that operatic music could carry the drama in a different and hopefully funny way. So I chose Puccini over Puff Daddy.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 24, 2010
“BURIED” | director, Rodrigo Cortés

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Ninety minutes inside a coffin. Ninety minutes. Inside a coffin. Underground. In an old wooden coffin. Darkness. No room. The most difficult decision? Believe it or not there was no choice for me, I didn’t see any blue pill, I simply NEEDED to do this. The most difficult decision would have probably been saying no. And I didn’t. Maybe I should have.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“BASS ACKWARDS” | writer-director, Linas Phillips

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 8:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Decisions, decisions. I was practically penniless again and semihomeless after finishing my last film, Great Speeches from a Dying World (ironically enough a film about homeless people) when I decided to start on Bass Ackwards. Not the best time to make a movie, one could argue. So…why? Well, I like to make movies and I have things to say, and because my friend, Todd Rohal, sent me a link to a Craigslist ad for a “strange van.” Of course, I bought the van and started writing a […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“BHUTTO” | director, Jessica Hernandez and Johnny O’Hara

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 9:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision was whether to bring in a narrator or try and let Benazir tell the story through her own words. The easy way out would have been a narrator, but since Benazir was such a public figure from such an early age we decided to piece her life together in her own words, keeping her alive not only by virtue of the documentary but in the documentary itself. We had a stroke of good fortune when producer Mark Siegel remembered the existence of interview tapes from […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“NIGHT CATCHES US” | writer-director, Tanya Hamilton

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The hardest decision I made on this film was mustering the courage to deconstruct my film completely in postproduction. I don’t know if other directors had similar experiences with their films, but when I first pieced Night Catches Us together, while I was pleased with it, it no longer felt as creative as I’d hoped. Something was missing — though I couldn’t determine what. At first I was too overwhelmed and exhausted to confront the problem, let alone address the ways I needed to fix it. But eventually, […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“NEW LOW” | director, Adam Bowers

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 6:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] There were a couple of reshoots during production, most of which were short and painless. But after we shot a pretty complicated scene at a time-sensitive location, I watched the footage on the camera in my car while the cast and crew went and got dinner, and I knew that the scene was unusable. So I had to go meet up with everyone, who were so relieved to be done with such a tricky scene, and tell them that we had to do it all over. The […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010

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