Sundance Day 5: Movies and Mayhem

Mos Def is here. He’s wandering the streets of Park City, promoting Be Kind Rewind , sitting on panels at Blackhouse Foundation, and being all-around AWESOME, because that’s just how he is. Yesterday I caught a quick glimpse of him, be still my heart...

At the AFCI-brunch, Ward took the stage, chatting up commissions as a resource for filmmakers, and I collected business cards and distributed incentive info. Then I settled into the gallery at Treasure Mountain Inn for a block of Slamdance shorts and a screening of View From the Bridge , the world’s longest documentary about Kosovo, and even after, I’m still unsure who was “cleansing” and why, and how they got away with it. Which is maybe the point, because I bet it seemed something like that to the people who lived it.

And during the doc, someone kept jostling the stands. Around the third hour, my knee was throbbing, and of course, I felt American white-girl guilt because, compared to what I witnessed on screen, this doesn’t even qualify as pain.

I’ve decided I love Slamdance. It’s centrally located, warm and fuzzy. They’re generous with sponsor tickets, low on pretension, and folks go out of their way to make the filmmakers feel essential (because hello? they are), whether they created a feature or a three-minute short.

As for Sundance, well…the “hosts” are kind to the filmmakers during the Q&A, but no one’s VIP unless you’ve been flashed across the big screen in half a dozen major theatrical releases, and even with credentialed passes (i.e. cast & crew of the astoundingly hyped Ballast), you’re still not getting into the free Patti Smith concert, even if you got there an hour early and waited in impossible cold. Which is understandable because Sundance has loads of corporate sponsors, and some of the world’s most respected (ahem, well-funded…oops, did I type that?) “indie” directors premier there, and everyone wants the action, and not everyone can get the action, because in life in general, there seems to be a fairly high premium on exclusion.

Don’t mind me. I may be a tad bitter over Patti. But truly, I am grateful to the Sundance Institute. For Mississippi film right now, Sundance is the vessel, spotlighting our state, our film commission, and our cast and crew, and encouraging some of the biggest players in the Industry to pay attention. Oh, and apparently during yesterday’s Ballast screening, Quentin Tarantino sat beside Jason, and stayed through the Q&A.

As seems to happen about once a year, at some film festival somewhere, I ran into my old Boston buddies, the Red Bucket Films guys (Ben Safdie screened The Story of Charles Riverbank in the Slamdance short block). Mad props to this crew for having mastered nuance and poker-faced absurdism at an exceptionally ambitious age.

Ward and Nina went to a hot-#### Variety party, and afterwards, we all convened at the condo to celebrate Ward’s birthday. We lit candles and sang, made snow ice-cream with condensed milk, ran out of paper towels, and had conversations about how Ani Difranco says you should never wear anything you can’t wipe your hands on, and then we all wiped our hands on our jeans, and Nina mentioned some high-school friend who once wiped greasy movie-popcorn hands on his socks, and I admitted my frequent adherence to this trick-of-the-trade (sorry Ani, but grease stains), and basically, we were all just there, Nina, Jerel, Ward, Jason, and later, Diego and Carolina Velasco and Anita, too. Pirates of the Caribbean III played in the background, prompting random wisecracks from the Jerel/Jason corner, while Ward and Jerel papa-smurfed about my knee, and really it was perfect, just to be warm and together and supported.

Around midnight, the Blackwell’s came to collect what’s theirs (namely, Jason), and then there were three Papa Smurfs (thanks Dean), and they raved about a panel that sported Robert Redford and Bono, and someone asked Bono when he would make a song that had as much impact as Yellow Submarine, and now my new favorite Jackson-family is at the airport, and our community is a wee bit smaller.

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