Sundance Film Festival

SLAMDANCE: “ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE UNDEAD'”S JORDAN GALLAND By Alicia Van Couvering

Up there with Snakes On A Plane in the pantheon of catchy titles, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a horror-comedy about Hamlet and the Holy Grail premiering in Slamdance this year. The movie stars Jake Hoffman, Devon Aoki, Jeremy Sisto, John Ventimiglia, Ralph Maccio and Waris Ahluwalia and was only the second East Coast feature film to use the Red camera. The film’s director, Jordan Galland, is a New York-bred renaissance man with deep and varied interests. At age eighteen, Jordan Galland started a band, Dopo Yume, which toured the world with Cibo Matto and Rufus Wainwright, and he […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2009
“THE MISSING PERSON”‘S NOAH BUSCHEL By Alicia Van Couvering

Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person stars Michael Shannon, last seen as the asylum-bound neighbor in Revolutionary Road, and if Sam Mendes had directed this film, he might have played it straight, disregarding the minefield of clichés to pay reverent homage to The Long Goodbye; Buschel knows what a bold move it is to make a noir in 2007, so he subverts the genre with un-ironic simplicity and a few tall guys hitting their heads on the ceiling. We meet Shannon’s character in his dungeon-like Chicago apartment. His cell phone is ringing; he’s a PI; he’s offered a lot of money […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2009
“ROUGH AUNTIES” director, Kim Longinotto

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 8:30 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] I’m trying to tell a story as simply as possible. I want the experience of watching the film to be like watching a fiction film so that you feel like you are there and things are happening around you. The editor, Ollie Huddleston, tries to use just one or two shots in each scene so that there’s not a lot of cutting and it flows smoothly. I want the film to be an emotional journey for the audience, one that feels as unexpected and as vivid […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“WHITE LIGHTNIN”‘ director, Dominic Murphy

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I didn’t consciously think about the forces affecting cinema today at any point during the long development of the movie. The script was inspired by the life of a real person but it’s fiction so we told the story in the way we thought would be most effective. But that’s not to say myself and the writers didn’t agonize over structure. I’m naturally drawn to character and narrative and I’ve worked in current affairs and documentary so that helped. We never made any decisions based on how we […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“PETER AND VANDY” writer-director, Jay DiPietro

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] “Was your story — its conception, structure and/or execution — shaped by the forces affecting cinema today?” Absolutely! On the first day of shooting I said to everyone, “Guys, I know we were all excited to shoot a slow, self-indulgent, boring movie. But due to the wintery economic climate, we need to change course and try to make an entertaining movie that people might enjoy. I’m sorry, everyone, change of plans.” And while we were shooting and editing, I often found myself saying, “You know, this looks fantastic…but […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“ONCE MORE WITH FEELING” director, Jeff Lipsky

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 2:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I’m known far and wide as a contrarian. Perhaps that’s a justified accusation. For in approaching my new film, the American Spectrum selection Once More With Feeling, I consciously elected to honor a very fine, very touching and very entertaining script by celebrating old-school filmmaking trappings within our very limited budget, though we did shoot in HD, a method I found to be more time-consuming and no less costly than shooting on film (but those are issues for a different article). Once More With Feeling is both […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“DIRT! THE MOVIE” co-director, Gene Rosow

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] We set out to make a feature-length documentary DIRT! The Movie inspired by the book Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth written by William Bryant Logan. When we started out on this project we were thinking of either a four-part television series or a feature-length documentary for theatrical release. We could either explore the subject as a topic as the book had done, or with a more traditional film narrative — in our case, telling the story of dirt and humans from dirt’s point of view. My […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“THE RECKONING” director, Pamela Yates

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court is the flagship film for a three-year Audience Engagement Campaign intended to get people around the world involved in international justice. While I was filming over two years across four continents in six languages, media possibilities exploded. So from the very beginning producer Paco de Onís, editor Peter Kinoy and I were thinking about how to create educational modules for the Web and adapt digital technologies for human-rights work. The result is that we and our Skylight Pictures Audience […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009
“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

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