For many filmmakers whose movies are accepted at the Sundance Film Festival, which runs Thursday through Jan. 26 in Park City, Utah, it’s all about what happens in those 11 days.
If you arrive without a distributor for your film, it’s all about finding one; if you arrive with distribution taken care of, it’s about creating a buzz the distributor can get behind. If you’re entered in competition, it’s about winning a prize.
For Travis Wilkerson of Ann Arbor, Mich., it’s about being there.
“Simply having my film in the festival has already eclipsed any expectations I might have had,” says Wilkerson, director of “An Injury to One,” a documentary that will screen in the festival’s Frontier sidebar for experimental filmmaking.
Though festival director Geoffrey Gilmore says Sundance will always remain true to its American independent spirit, there is no shortage of star power.
Salma Hayek, who’s on the Oscar short list for her title role in the Frida Kahlo biography “Frida,” will be on hand to introduce her first film as a director. “The Maldonado Miracle” is about a small town where a statue of Jesus appears to be shedding tears of blood. Matt Dillon will promote “City of Ghosts,” in which he plays a con man on the run in a cast that also includes James Caan and Gerard Depardieu.
Rumors are rife that Bob Dylan will show up to play a private concert connected to “Masked and Anonymous,” the feature-directing debut of former “Seinfeld” director Larry Charles. Dylan stars as a cult figure who is sprung from prison to play a benefit concert in Latin America. Penelope Cruz, John Goodman and Luke Wilson also star.
The festival’s opening-night film is “Levity,” a drama starring Billy Bob Thornton as an ex-con seeking redemption for a long-ago murder and co-starring Morgan Freeman and Holly Hunter, who will receive the festival’s annual Independent Vision Award.
All together, 85 feature-length fiction films, 35 feature-length documentaries and 60 short films will be shown over the 11 days. They were chosen from more than 2,000 features and more than 3,300 shorts.
Some, like Jim Sheridan’s poignant “In America,” have been shown at previous festivals, and a few have been released overseas. But most of the 20,000 people expected at the festival this year will see these films for the first time.
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SUNDANCE DIARY
Check RedEye Thursday through Jan. 27 for an insider’s view of Sundance from RedEye contributor Therese Shechter, who’ll write a daily diary from the film festival.
