Sundance Film Festival

“THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE” writer-director, David Russo

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 5:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] While attending Sundance with my two short films, Populi and Pan with Us, I found myself bored with the majority of low-budget independent feature films, particularly their third acts. I didn’t know what specifically caused the redundant patterns in the scripts but I expected more originality from things that carry the qualifier “independent.” Never having given any thought to making feature films before (or narrative works of any kind for that matter), I came home with a bug up my butt and wrote something that I hoped […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“DARE” director, Adam Salky

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] It’s very hard to begin creating a story with a defined set of rules. It has to come from the gut and has to be truthful. David Brind, the writer of Dare, and I set out to tell a story within the format of a full-length film. It started out as a 15-minute, first-year film-school project that left us with a distinct “What happens next?” feeling. We’ve spent the last four years turning it into a feature. Dare is a story about the need to take chances when […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
SOME KIND OF LOVE By Nick Dawson

Greg Mottola’s Adventureland screened in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. You can read our story on the film in the Winter issue section.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
“BIG FAN” writer-director, Robert Siegel

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Big Fan was edited on the biggest, awesomest computer monitor I’ve ever been in a room with. Thirty inches. As big as it was, though, it still wasn’t nearly enough. That 30-inch monitor was just a tease, whetting my appetite to see my movie on something bigger — like 800 inches. A movie screen. I don’t care what the trends are. What massive, fundamental sea changes are taking place within the industry. No filmmaker fantasizes about what their movie will look like projected onto a 1.5 inch iPod […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
“BLACK DYNAMITE” co-writer-director, Scott Sanders

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] With Black Dynamite, we wanted to make a blaxploitation movie that was as close to a 1974 blaxploitation movie as you could make in 2009. We wanted to emphasize humor, but we didn’t want to go too far outside of the strict boundaries of the genre. For us, the humor comes out in how anachronistic it all is. Everything is exposed; the clunky structure of the plots, the huge tonal shifts that can occur within a scene from one moment to another, and the desire to please […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
Against the Current | Writer/Director Peter Callahan

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 8:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] The whole point of independent filmmaking, in my mind, is to do something original, something challenging, and not to try and cater to whatever the whims of the current marketplace may be. If one is fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to make a film, I think the goal should be, “How can I make the best movie possible?” not “What do I think will sell in today’s marketplace?” So I did my best not to worry about anything other than making a good film and […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
CROSSING OVER: LOUIS PSIHOYOS By Alicia Van Couvering

Unlike other films playing in our three-part look at crossover artists at Sundance, The Cove is not playing in New Frontier, but in the Documentary Competition, and that’s despite its director’s non-traditional background. Louie Psihoyos was one of the world’s top-ranked photographers, a staff member at National Geographic who had traveled the world taking portraits of the world’s most famous people and abstract concepts (you try photographing “science.”) He was also an avid diver who witnessed year by year the physical destruction of the world’s oceans. He and his friend Jim Clarke, founder of Netscape and WebMD, decided to form […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2009
“ARLEN FABER” writer-director, John Hindman

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Although technology may have shortened the average person’s patience over the past few years I believe that storytelling should never rush to keep up. It is true that we live in an increasingly fast culture. Our communication demands that our lives be summed up with only as much information as will fit on a Facebook profile. We don’t invite, we e-vite. We don’t talk, we type. And we quit sharing and started blogging. Don’t get me wrong. Many of these things are totally cool. But I think that […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
“DON’T LET ME DROWN” co-writer-director, Cruz Angeles

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Not all, but the majority of short-form works on the Net are gimmicky and instant pleasures — like candy. I am not interested in making candy. I want my works to be a full meal — a story that keeps ringing in your head, something that sticks and stays with you for a very long time. Cinema will falter for a bit but will not die. I believe the new developments are supplementary and not replacements of long-form work. When [co-writer] Maria Topete and I were writing Don’t […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
“CRUDE” director, Joe Berlinger

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 6:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] As someone who believes in making non-fiction feature films for the big screen, Crude is in many ways a reaction against some of the forces affecting cinema today. From a craft standpoint, Crude is steeped in the traditions of cinema vérité filmmaking that I have embraced throughout my career — it’s a film with a great deal of complexity and nuance, requiring a viewer’s full attention in order to appreciate all that I hope it has to offer. While new forms of distribution are important for independent filmmakers […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009

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