Sundance Eve

The far wall at the end of the concourse at the Salt Lake City airport—which is packed with people surging toward the Sundance film festival in nearby Park City—features a ski map showing Park City’s peaks. The giant text arcing above the craggy summit reads, “Remember, this is 1:1,000,000 scale.”

By my calculation, this puts the resort town’s highest point at more than 100,000 feet above sea level. No wonder the atmosphere is so heady!

Or maybe it’s just the first taste of hyperbole, which does nothing but intensify on the ride to Park City’s Main Street, the epicenter of the festival, already so crowded with people that you can stir them with an icicle. They’re not here for skiing, though, or at least not primarily. The slopes are all but deserted. This week they’re here for films and glitz.

Sundance, of course, is the premiere venue for independent American film. Its proven track record at generating buzz and bucks means it receives thousands of submissions each year from people who’ve made complete films but haven’t yet worked out the details of how they’ll show them to people. The Sundance programmers will anoint a precious few of those submissions and screen them publicly over the next ten days for the first time, for festival goers, film critics, journalists, and distributors, big and small, who are eager to snatch up a potential winner and put it into your local multiplex later this year.

For the studios, it’s a market for films they didn’t have to fund; they can evaluate the final products when they’re completed, although they may then need to bid against other studios to get the ones they like. For the filmmakers, it’s an avenue of complete freedom to make whatever films they want, as long as they can scrape together the funds and as long as they don’t stray too far from what’s marketable if they actually want to sell the finished movie. That’s one reason the theoretical diversity of this “independent” system sometimes falls short; at the end of the day, it’s the same folks deciding what shows up in your town, the same suits to please.

The first film of the 2008 festival screens tonight, followed by nine full days of movies, and no one knows yet which ones are ice palaces and which ones are piles of black snow. I’ll let you know, dear reader! Which to lick, which to kick, etc. I’ve seen a fair number of stinkers at Sundances past, and a fair number of good films, too. One of my favorites from a couple of years ago was a gem called Half Nelson (Paste’s number one film of 2006), and I’m excited to see that the same filmmakers, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, have a second film in this year’s lineup. They’re alumni now. They’ve earned it.

But generally, the films that I enjoy at Sundance are surprises, because more than most festivals it’s a showcase for the unknown. In the pre-show lull, there are those who pore over the schedule to read it like tea leaves. What does it mean that last year’s opening film was a political documentary with no distributor (Chicago 10) and this year’s is a comedy that not only has a distributor but already has trailers showing in theaters (In Bruges).

What does it mean? Who knows. Better to wait and see the films, I say.

So stay tuned. It’s 6 degrees out there. I’m trying to stay warm. I’m doing it for you. Oh the suffering.