Sundance Day 2: Which is really all about Slamdance...

It’s 8pm and I am already exhausted. For one thing, it takes a ridiculous amount of energy just to stay warm. The high today hovered at 20 degrees, and the low landed somewhere around 1 degree. At any given time, I sport four layers.

Because I’m here on my own dime, I have a different agenda than my Film Office co-workers. Yes, I want to represent Mississippi and entice filmmakers (and more importantly, filmmaker dollars) to perceive our state as the marvelous commodity that it is, but mainly, I’m here to see movies. And since I have an all-access Slamdance pass and most Sundance films are wait-listed (which means you go to the venue three separate times—once to take a number, once to hopefully purchase a ticket, and if you’re lucky, once to actually see the movie), I spent much of the day parked in cozy theaters at Treasure Mountain Inn, gorging on Slamdance flicks, attending filmmaker Q&A’s and collecting submissions to Crossroads.

Park City is amazing right now. The entire town is obsessed with film and/or the perception of being obsessed with film. I’ve never experienced this to such a degree, and I spent a year bouncing around trendy L.A. neighborhoods, where conversations don’t exist without an “Industry” reference. Beyond the actual film venues, Main Street is lined with galleries, cafes and pubs, all of which have been rented as “lounges” by production houses, festival sponsors and film commissions. The streets swarm with cameras and booms, and informal interviews are conducted on every corner. But despite the hype and the cold, people seem grateful to be here.

Thus far, two standouts have been Sundance’s New Frontier Café, a showcase for experimental cinematic art (there’s a great video clip on the festival homepage) and the Blackhouse Foundation’s Open House—a low-lit mecca of wine-sipping and people-watching. Even ran into a girl I worked with, at the Black Programming Consortium’s New Media Institute, which was held in Jackson last November…funny, this movie-making business. It’s a small, chummy kinda place to be.