Before I recap previous years, it is helpful to understand how Sundance movies are defined. Thousands of movies are submitted each year and a jury picks those that are actually screened at the festival. The films are placed in one of nine categories. The films in the competition categories are judged again during the festival and a Grand Prize Winner is awarded in each category. These are fun to attend because there is also an audience award, so we get to vote for our favorite.
The competition categories are pretty self-explanatory. They are:
· Independent Film Competition: Documentary
· Independent Film Competition: Dramatic
· World Cinema Competition: Documentary
· World Cinema Competition: Dramatic
· Shorts Programs
The other categories require a little clarification. They are:
Premieres
These films offer a selection of the latest work from established directors and world premieres of highly anticipated films. (These films are usually already slated for distribution and many of them make it to Portland.) This category has featured movies like Motorcycle Diaries, Little Miss Sunshine, Thank you for Smoking and Riding Giants. Truth be told, we have seen some stinkers in this category.
Spectrum
The Spectrum program presents dramatic and documentary films from both established and new filmmakers from the U.S. and around the world. (These are not judged.) We have seen some excellent films in this category.
Park City at Midnight
Park City at Midnight films typically push the envelope and can even be thought of a irreverent. This category may include horror films, over-the-top comedies, surreal tales, explicit material, and bizarre stories that defy categorization. This is where we stumbled into (and many people stumbled out of) a porn movie. Lesson learned: if it says "porn" in the catalog, it is porn.
New Frontier
New Frontier celebrates experimentation and cinematic innovation. In this category, we saw one such experimental work. The name of the film was The joy of Life. The first half of the movie was deserted shots of very non-picturesque parts of San Francisco (why these perfectly still images were recorded on a movie camera alluded us). While viewing what basically amounted to a very uninteresting slide show, the voice over was a Lesbian reading from her sex diary. Then, halfway through it, the movie became a documentary about the Golden Gate bridge being the number one suicide landmark in the country. Let's just say, we didn't get it and, therefore now avoid this category.
Despite the fact that at first we didn't really know what we were doing, we did manage to see some excellent movies. A recap of 2004 is coming up next.
No comments:
Post a Comment