Back in 2011, around 50 percent of the films that played the Sundance Film Festival went on to receive distribution. “That was an unacceptable violation of our mission as a nonprofit to connect audiences and artists,” recalls Chris Horton, director of Sundance’s Artist Services, which was founded that same January in an effort to help filmmakers navigate the changing landscapes in funding, marketing and distribution. For the subsequent three years, Artist Services partnered with content aggregator New Video to distribute over 100 Sundance pictures, working with the filmmakers to determine the best possible release and windowing strategies. When Sundance’s deal […]

A frosty night alone inside an unheated school bus puts a hypothermic gradeschooler at death’s door. The multiple protagonists in model ensemble Bluebird milk the mishap, each in their own way. In an oddly similar fashion, director Lance Edmands works — let’s say plays — his audience. He short-circuits a chilling overview of the mishap’s immediate impact in favor of charging a profound visual essay on the power of love — ongoing, terminated, or altogether lacking. The titles of the two mournful vintage pop songs most prominent on the soundtrack evoke cataclysms, in theory echoing the emotional toll on those […]

Lance Edmands’ ensemble drama Bluebird sets its story in a blue collar, hardworking industrialized town. The screenplay uses a tragic instance of negligence to connect age-defining experiences (first love, job frustration, potential loss of a family member) in the complex lives of its multitude of characters. Distracted by the title bird, driver Leslie (played by Amy Morton) fails to see an unconscious student in the back of her schoolbus before going home; when he’s discovered near-dead the next day, she’s accused of not doing her job properly, leading to everyone having an opinion about her. Featuring some beautiful, quietly arresting snow-covered images caught on […]

I still have a Maine driver’s license, even though I’ve lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade now. When it comes up for renewal every few years, I travel back to the DMV in the town where I grew up and dutifully pose for a new photograph. People think this is crazy (and illegal) and I suppose they’re right, but it means a lot to me to be identified as a Mainer. When I get carded at a bar, the bouncer will take one look at my ID and inevitably say something like, “Maine? Who the hell is from […]

Bluebird, Lance Edmands’s quietly disquieting directorial debut, follows a cast of characters in rural Maine, where every good intention is rendered fruitless in the face of a tragic accident. Lesley (Amy Morton), the local school bus driver, passes over a sleeping student at the end of her shift, leaving him to freeze into a coma overnight. The boy’s drifting, negligent young mother, Marla (Louisa Krause), seeks solace in the possibility of a lawsuit, and distraction in a dalliance with her co-worker, while her own mother monitors the child’s health in the hospital. Lesley’s husband, Richard (John Slattery), is an inch […]