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Sundance Film Festival 2006: Day 1
You probably thought the New Year started January 1. Quite wrong. In the movie calendar, 2006 doesn't really kick off until 18 days later, on the opening weekend of the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah. For some young filmmakers, this time next week, their year will be pretty much a done deal: either they will be basking in the glare of glowing reviews and fending off million dollar contracts with big Hollywood studios; or they will be trying to pick up the pieces wondering just what they devoted the last 12-18 months of their life to. Think I exaggerate? Well, perhaps inspired by our own Sundance Collection (only kidding) the festival recently released their own Sundance Film Festival Collection DVD box set to commemorate their 25th Anniversary. It features The Usual Suspects; Clerks; Boys Don't Cry; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; American Splendor; In the Bedroom; American Movie; Real Women Have Curves; Capturing the Friedmans and Smoke Signals. (It retails for a hefty $150 by the way, and is only available in the US, region 1.)
What's exciting about Sundance is that you're really stepping into the unknown. That's true of Cannes to an extent, but at Cannes the films all come with big name auteurs attached. In Sundance, most of the filmmakers have yet to make their names. Last year's crop was fairly typical. I was impressed with 40 Shades of Blue; Me, You and Everyone We Know; The Squid and the Whale; Junebug; Mysterious Skin; Thumbsucker; The Aristocrats and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Almost all of those movies have gone on to get distributed in the US and Britain (some are due in the coming weeks and months); some, like The Squid and the Whale and Junebug, have outside chances of picking up Oscar recognition when the nominations are announced later this week.
Tom Charity Read our Sundance coverage from last year |
It is absolutely true to say that Sundance discovered all these films. Some, perhaps most, would have made their way in the world well enough without the festival's help. But some would not. Some would have failed to find distribution, and never seen the light of day. Who knows, without the peculiar mixture of Hollywood hustlers and independent determination that constitutes the Sundance Experience, Bryan Singer, Kevin Smith and Steven Soderbergh might never have gone on to bigger and (mostly) better things.
What am I looking forward to this year? Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep; Terry Zwigoff re-teaming with Ghost World scribe Daniel Clowes for Art School Confidential; and a first fiction film by Brit documentary maker Clive Gordon, Cargo for starters. I'm also intrigued to see the first films directed by Police Academy alumnus Bobcat Goldthwaite and Chasing Amy star Joey Lauren Adams… former Presidential candidate Ralph Nader is in town. So is Jennifer Aniston. Helena Christensen. And John Waters. With a cast like that who needs Celebrity Big Brother?