SUNDANCE 2008

GETTING TO SUNDANCE

We finished shooting my new film "Inside Darkness" on a Thursday night, and early the next morning I was on a plane for my annual pilgrimage to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. "Inside Darkness" is the 45-minute piece I've been working on about three presidential candidates mysteriously trapped in a room together (no, it's not a comedy). It will be shown in 2-3 minute episodes on the Internet and also distributed as a DVD with discussion questions and other extras.

The 6-day shoot ended with a creative miracle. The schedule of the theater where we shot and the schedule of one of the actors had put us behind. The last day looked like it was going to be a long one, but late in the afternoon our cinematographer, the talented and dedicated Jayson Crothers, came up with an idea for abbreviating and combining the last two scenes.

As Karen Landry, who plays the Republican incumbent, put it, the revision was elegant. She and the other actors, Scott Alan Smith and Russell Andrews, are very very good. Joe Rassulo, who very capably and enthusiastically produced with me and read my script a million times, brought them and other quite talented crew members to the project. Everyone was working for little money, relatively speaking. And we all worked very well together. What a pleasure, a great experience.

I arrived in Salt Lake City, but before heading to Sundance, John Paul and I sang our Black & White concert at the University of Utah's Catholic Newman Center. We've been singing these concerts that chart the intersection of black and white music in America. We weave the songs together with stories of our lives and our friendship as Dominican friars and priests.

The next day, our classmate Daniel (of the Spiritual Magic of Fr. Daniel) shuttled us to Park City for a concert at St. Mary's Catholic Church, where I stay and also preach every year during the festival. Sunday morning, we finally entered the Sundance sanctuary and saw a movie: "The Wackness," a fun and sometimes insightful comedy about a teen who trades weed for therapy (from Sir Ben Kingsley, who was there for the Q&A). John Paul headed back home to San Diego, and I was just starting...

JESUS AND HITLER

My favorite film of this year's festival is a thriller called "The Wave." It's based on the true story of a California high school's experiment in autocracy in the 1960's. The film is set in current Germany, though, where the students are especially tired of the subject of autocracy. They've been taught all their lives about the evils of Nazism and are certain that such a movement could never happen in their country again. Their upstart teacher, who would have preferred to teach the unit on anarchy, gets their attention of his bored students, though, with a participatory experiment.

Of course, it goes bad. But not without some thought-provoking benefits, including a sense of belonging and purpose for the students, especially the misfits ("Breakfast Club" meets "Fight Club"?) I'm told the true-life teacher was there for the Q&A on opening night. The true story is even less plausible than the film. In real life, the movement spread over three high schools and swept up 800 students in just five days.

To pursue the theme further, I saw a documentary called "Durakovo: Village of Fools," about a Russian village where youth go to get indoctrinated into the country's widespread Christian nationalist movement. "God, tsar, and fatherland" -- that's the motto of the village and the movement, and they want to get rid of all foreigners and Western influences.

The leader of the village is a fat man with a swimming pool, sauna, and two overworked cellphones. He's a mean and unpredictable man whose whims are obeyed with fear. Okay, so he doesn't sound so much like Jesus but more like a Hollywood producer.

This is all fascinating (and frightening -- it all sounds a little bit like Christian nationalism in the U.S.), but my fear of documentaries was also fed -- I prefer the strong story and aesthetic usually found only in fiction films.

These two films made it into my annual Sundance homily. The gospel story for the Sunday at the end of the festival, with the brothers leaving behind their fishing nets and families to follow a stranger, sounded a little bit like these movies. Is there a difference? Then there's the darkness that happens inside that room where I trap the presidential candidates in "Inside Darkness."

FATHER FIGURES

My second favorite film at the festival was "Red," with the always-powerful Brian Cox as an old man seeking an apology from the boys who killed his dog. I guess I like thought-provoking thrillers. The old man is amazingly controlled and balanced in his initial reaction. He doesn't want revenge or even jail for the boys. And even more than an apology, he seems to want the boys to learn a lesson and mature.

But one of the boys is particularly vicious (perhaps a weakness of the film -- can a kid, or anyone, be that evil?), his father isn't much better, and the old man has some hidden wounds of his own, so one thing leads to another. I was really disturbed, even sickened a bit, when a good part of the audience applauded and cheered when the old man goads the bad seed boy to attack him so that he can attack back. What was especially disturbing was that I wanted to cheer, too.

Were the filmmakers cheering as well? I'd like to think they were rather bating us, implicating us in the old man's revenge so that we would be chastened later. The old man holds the boy down and seems to be within his rights as he warns the boy to repent. But then the old man bashes the boy's head into the sidewalk. No cheering this time. Did we really see this calm, measured, upright man do that? What else might he be capable of? What might we be capable of?

My third favorite film was "Captain Abu Raed," an audience favorite and Jordan's first fiction feature in fifty years. It's a really tender and touching about another old man, an airport janitor who finds a pilot's hat in the garbage one day. When a boy in his poor neighborhood sees him wearing the hat, the boy asks the old man to tell him stories about his adventures around the world as a pilot. The old man insists he's not really a pilot, but the boy will have none of it, so eventually the old man finds himself telling stories to all the local children about his fictitious adventures as a pilot.

When one boy tries to tell the other children that the old man is a janitor, the old man invites him into the group rather than excluding him. But when the boy manages to convince the other children that the old man is a janitor and not a pilot, the other children disown the old man. However, the old man forgives the boy with gentleness and grace. "Malish," he tells the boy. "It's okay."

In fact, at great risk to himself, the old man decides it's time to act on protecting the boy from his abusive father. Besides a few performance flaws by the mostly inexperienced actors (which should have been caught by the apparently inexperienced director), the only flaw in the film is its lack of acknowledgement that the old man should have come to the rescue much sooner. Or is this lack of guidance for the audience a strength?

A MIDDLE EASTERN SUMMIT ON A SUMMIT IN THE MIDDLE OF UTAH

"Under the Bombs" is another good Middle Eastern film, this one from Lebanon. Just four days after the official ending of Israel's bombing of Lebanon two summers ago, while the bombs were still dropping, they started shooting this improvised fictional story of a mother looking for her little boy during the bombing. The improvisation led to a more episodic, less dramatically and engaging structure, but it also led to an immediacy and to an authentic intimacy between the mother and her taxi driver. The mother was played with force and depth by Nada Abou Farhat, who has a striking, unadorned beauty.

I didn't get to see "The Strangers," an Israeli film that lots of people told me was a favorite of theirs. It's a story about a Palestinian and Israeli meeting on the subway in Germany and falling in love. It was shot during the actual World Cup to lend the film a feeling of authenticity. It got very real when Israel's bombing of Lebanon began, and the writer/director decided to continue the film with the lovers trying to insulate themselves from the war by escaping to Paris.

The writer/directors of all these two films and "Captain Abu Raed" were on a Middle Eastern panel that included the directors of "Be Like Others" (in Iran, homosexual relationships are banned, so many gays and lesbians tragically become transsexuals), "Slingshot Hip Hop" (Palestinian hip hop artists), "Dinner with the President" (the filmmakers' request of dinner with Pakistani president Musharraf is granted), and "Recycle" (a Muslim scholar and his boys collect cardboard in Zarqa, Jordan, where the infamous terrorist al Zarqawi grew up).

I saw this last one and was disappointed. When will I learn not to expect a good story from a documentary? This was just too elliptical for me. What is the filmmaker trying to say about terrorism, Islam, and poverty?

The greatest thing about the panel was that these people were all on it together, Israeli included.

BLACK IN THE U.S.A.

Quite a few films involved the black experience in the United States. My favorite of these was "Sugar," made by the same people who did "Half Nelson," the Ryan Gosling movie that was my favorite film anywhere in 2006. "Sugar" is about a 20-year-old man from the Dominican Republic who comes to the United States to try to work his way up the minor league ranks to the big leagues. I wasn't thrilled about the baseball theme, but I liked "Half Nelson" so much and a ticket was available, I decided to give it a try.

Apparently, the baseball stuff was quite authentic as movies go. What was really compelling was the way the system devours these young players and their dreams, a system depicted not as malicious or even particularly greedy. It's a bit jarring and somewhat anticlimactic, yet refreshing, when the movie becomes about something other than the young man's baseball ambitions.

I also liked "Ballast" very much. It's set in the Mississippi Delta and is about a young boy, his mother, and his uncle trying to figure out what each other means to them after the boy's father kills himself. Non-actors do a pretty good job in this understated, quiet, slow, and simple film without any music.

"Trouble the Waters" won the documentary jury prize. It's a very informative, sometimes maddening, and ultimately uplifting view of the post-Katrina struggle of a young black woman, Kim Rivers, and her husband using the crisis to move beyond drug dealing and self-concern despite lack of government help. She had just bought a video camera for $20 before Katrina and caught the absurd and shameful story of her and her husband among those without transportation out before the hurricane hit.

Her grandmother was left behind in the hospital and died, and her brother and his prison mates were abandoned by the guards. The directors stumbled upon Kim and her footage after being thrown out of the local National Guard headquarters, where they had planned on shooting a film about the Guard returning from Iraq to destroyed homes.

Kim's upbeat but in-your-face attitude grew on me until I watched with awe and admiration as she rapped along to a recording about self-empowerment. Then I realized it was her that was on the recording.

As important and disturbing as Kim's hurricane footage is, it needed to be trimmed more. Also, the story was a bit disjointed. I think its jury prize was less about the movie and more about kicking the government in the rear for still not rebuilding the 9th Ward in New Orleans. Then again, I'm the guy who lacks respect for documentaries.

"North Starr" shouldn't even have been accepted into Sundance -- it's littered with homemade philosophy from one of the characters, unevenly played by the writer/director, and hampered by an implausible climax. Yet I don't regret watching it -- it has some very evocative themes and images. It's about a black rapper who escapes from Houston to a redneck town, where he is greeted with love and hate. The highlight was the music, especially when the main character raps, accompanied by a white country band.

Despite my docuphobia, a handful of "black in America" documentaries are calling out to me from the festival lineup: "Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North" (the filmmaker and nine members of her extended family -- she invited 200 -- journey from Ghana to Cuba to uncover the shame of their being from our country's largest slave-trading family), "The Order of Myths" (the director's film about Mardi Gras in Mobile becomes an expose of the persistent segregation of the celebration, with the current white queen being from the family that enslaved the family of the current black queen), "Made in America" (the deep roots of South Central L.A.'s poverty and gangs), "The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins" (white feminist Vanessa Beecroft adopts black Sudanese twins and controversially uses them in her performance art), and "The Black List" (portraits of 20 contemporary influential African Americans).

TWO OTHER FAVORITES

"Frozen River" won the jury prize for dramatic feature. It's a simple, straightforward story with a great premise (a white woman joins a young Mohawk woman in human smuggling in order to get enough cash to buy a new trailer for her family to live in), fascinating location and cultural context (a Mohawk reservation and its environs in the dead of winter on the Canadian border), and a very strong lead performance (Melissa Leo).

Further drama comes from the young Mohawk woman's desire to get her baby back from her mother-in-law. The actor who played this character was weak, and the visual element of the film was weak as well, so I'm surprised that it won the big prize. Still, it was a solid little movie.

"Sleep Dealer" won both screenwriting awards, the general award and the special science-related award. The special effects sometimes showed their low budget, but the futuristic story was very involving and insightful -- another thought-provoking thriller. In Oaxaca, Mexico, a young man's homemade radio surveillance rig gets him in trouble with the American high-tech, militarized company that owns the water supply (one of the documentaries at Sundance, "Flow," reveals plans for the privatization of water supplies).

The young man escapes to Tijuana to earn money for his poor family. There, he is literally plugged in as a virtual "node" worker for a construction site somewhere across the border -- talk about outsourcing. Meanwhile, his new girlfriend uses her own node implants to upload and sell on the Internet her new memories of her boyfriend. And a certain buyer is especially interested...

TWO NOTABLES

A couple movies that didn't make it my top tier are especially noteworthy, the first one another Internet movie of sorts. I sent to see "Downloading Nancy" because it stars the great Maria Bello, but I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. She plays a neglected housewife who cuts herself and searches the Internet for a man to abuse her.

The subject matter and lack of any traditional "redemptive" progression (no one here is trying to get better) made for difficult viewing. I thought about following those who walked out (did I want to put myself through this?) but was glad I stayed for the hints of tenderness that finally came.

I would never have sought out the documentary (it's a documentary) "Man on Wire," but I had a ticket to the first award winner screening of the last day. Now this was a documentary with a story. And even a little style. Philippe Petit is the French tightrope walker who crossed between the World Trade Center towers in the '70s, and the movie plays out like a kind of heist movie, using re-enactments to show how he and his team managed to sneak to the top of the towers and prepare the rigging for the walk.

The heist element gives way at times, though, especially at the climax, to the poetic and surprisingly moving footage and still photos of his art, accompanied by Eric Satie's beautiful and melancholy music -- so very French. Petit was at earlier screenings and was asked if he had any phobias. Spiders.

THE WAIT-LIST SUBCULTURE

Each year, tickets have been harder to come by in advance and I've gotten more and more relaxed about it. This year, I went to Sundance without any tickets and without even reading about the movies.

On Monday morning, I did think to go to the main box office, where each morning they release some tickets for the day to some of the previously "sold out films," having determined by tarot cards and deep prayer the approximate number of passholders and entourage members will show up at the screenings. I showed up at 8:00 a.m. for the 8:30 opening time, whereas some people had camped out in the lobby for the night, but I actually got quite lucky. I was even able to pick up some tickets for the rest of the week to films that had never sold out to begin with.

But my bread and butter is the wait-list line. Sure, John Paul and I waited three hours for a movie the first day and didn't even get again. But it only happened to me once more the whole week. Besides, the wait-list line is a great place to meet people. I met lots of great people this year. It's funny, too, how you often run into the same people again (and sometime again). It's fun to get to know the volunteers, who stay at the same venue for the entire festival, and often from year to year.

I almost panicked at one point when I realized having a few tickets already was going to keep me from the wait-list line for a small part of the week -- what would I do with myself? What do the upper classes of Sundance do, the people with tickets or even, gulp, passes?

Ticketing and other tips:

Step One: Register online in the fall. The only deal on passes is possibly the Adrenaline Pass, which allows the intrepid to see any movie that starts AFTER 10 P.M. and the first screening at each theater in the morning (usually 8:30 or 9:00). The package deals are pretty expensive, too, and a lot of luck is involved in getting tickets to the movies you really want to see. I like to register online in the fall to get randomly assigned a time slot for getting back online to choose individual tickets. But nowadays you're not even guaranteed a time slot, and even if you get one, the tickets will have been picked over by then. So it makes sense to register -- just don't sweat it or get your hopes up.

Step Two: If you're up, check out the box office one or more mornings during the festival for the new tickets released as I described above. They release tickets for the first screenings of the next day as well. At least one year, a woman had an underground ticket exchange going outside the box office.

Step Three: The wait-list line. In addition to the high success rate if you get there early and the joy of meeting other wait-listers, the wait-list line allows you to choose movies that you've been hearing or reading about since the festival started. The best way to start up a conversation with someone in line or on the bus (or at the cold bus stop) is by asking a person if they've seen something especially good yet. Besides, it's hard to digest that catalogue ahead of time. And those hyperbolic, high-falutin' film descriptions sometimes don't even give you a good feel for the tone of the film.

Wait-list tickets are only $10 instead of $15. If you get really lucky, someone will come up and hand you their tickets, especially if you're at the front of the line. Keep your eyes open, too, for people selling their tickets. The best place for this is also at the front of the wait-list line. If you're really intense and you're with someone, you can even decide ahead of time, so that you don't miss your opportunity, whether you're going to accept or buy just one ticket if it's offered, leaving the other person to wait and wonder. Also, if you both get in, is it more important to sit together if possible than to get a good seat?

They hand out wait-list numbers two hours before the screening (one hour before the first screenings of the day). Then you can get out of line and relax until a half hour before the show, when you get back in line in your original order. This year, they insisted you would lose your privileged place in line if you were late for this half-hour call. If you want to be at the front of the line (which very occasionally still won't get you a seat), show up when the previous show starts, usually three hours before your screening. But don't bother coming before that because there won't be anywhere to line up.

It's easier to get into the first screenings of the day and the screenings midweek. Also, the last day, when they show all the award-winning movies (all the important people are gone by then). It can also pay off to wait at the larger theaters like Eccles and the Racquet Club.

If you get into a movie, you might consider coming out of the movie and, after the next movie starts, getting in line for the movie after that -- relax, buy some chili or a sandwich, chat people up, or, if you're weird like me, lie on the floor for a few Z's. Very occasionally you can come out of a movie and get into the very next one. Also, free and frequent shuttles will take you to the other venues.

If you want to stay for the Q&A (one of they great joys of film festivals, especially at Sundance, where the highly-talented and often famous writers, directors, actors, etc. are most likely to show up), figure on about 45 minutes from the time the closing credits end to the time you arrive at a new venue.

With each successive screening of a film (there are four), there are fewer people from the film available for Q&A, but usually the director will at least be there, except sometimes on the last day. The premiere screenings are especially fun, although wait-listing is harder for those, especially for the movies with pre-festival "buzz." I like to sit close and on the side where the microphone is, so that I'll be able to see people for the Q&A.

There's also the fringe festivals that have popped up around Sundance. Slamdance is the biggy, hosted at Treasure Mountain Inn a block up Main from the Egyptian Theater. Slamdance can be hard to get tickets for, but you can walk in at the other festivals.

Tromadance is a mainstay and usually takes place at a bar at the bottom of Main. The Park City Film Music Festival and sometimes other festivals and special screenings (sometimes free) take place in the mall across the street from the Egyptian. The last couple years Lisa Thompson from the Filmmakers Alliance (a great L.A. group I've joined) has put together CinemaSlam at this same venue.

There are also a couple official Sundance venues, the Filmmaker Lodge and New Frontiers, with free panels. Get there an hour early if possible.

Relax and take what and who comes your way. It's all good on the mountain.