Sundance Responses

“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 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“CLIMATE REFUGEES” | director, Michael Nash

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 8:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] The single biggest decision I was faced with during the making of Climate Refugees literally happened on the first day. Was it possible to make a documentary film about climate change that would be politically bipartisan? I wanted to create a film that would play to both sides of the aisle. To me, I saw climate change as a metaphor in which a woman is swimming in the ocean. She is attacked by a shark. She is barely able to swim to shore. Two men see the […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010 Sundance Responses
“WOMEN WITHOUT MEN” | writer-director, Shirin Neshat

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 6:30 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Women Without Men was my first feature-length film, so numerous challenges had to be faced throughout the process of its making. First of all I’m a visual artist — a photographer and a video artist — so I had never written a script or had worked with a producer, professional actors, or a large crew before. Also the film was based on a well-known novel by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. This novel was written in a style of magic realism, an extremely difficult piece of literature to readapt […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“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 Sundance Responses
“SWEET, SAMPLED AND LEFTOVA” | Kalup Linzy

New Frontier Performances and Installations [PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 6:30 pm — New Frontier on Main, Park City] One of the most difficult things that has come up in my projects over and over is the casting. For different reasons, many of my projects have never included the original intended cast I had in mind. I have learned to be open to this, but at the same time I have to wonder if I compromised my original vision or maybe the universe has a plan of its own. Either way I’ve learned from the experiences and hope that I […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010 Sundance Responses

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