Sundance Day #0

As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I recently got back from my first trip to Sundance. Over the past few years, I've submitted two of my films to the festival - my short Half Laughing in addition to Butch Jamie, and while neither one of them got in, I still hope to someday go with one of my films. But in the interim, I thought it would be a good opportunity to go and check it out.

There was some talk about boycotting the festival since it's in Utah, and so much of the money in favor of prop 8 came from Utah. However, there seemed to be the general consensus among GLBT filmmakers that since Sundance has always supported us, at times when no one else would, it didn't seem right to take our support away from them. That and of course, we would only be hurting ourselves by not going and partaking in what Sundance had to offer.

Park City is about 700 miles from L.A., and I decided to drive in the interest of doing the trip as cheaply as possible. I had some friends driving up as well but they were staying two days longer than I had planned, so I made the trek by myself. It took over 11 hours to get there - longer than I've driven by myself before, and I felt it was quite an accomplishment. Here are some pics from the road -




That night, I arrived at the condo that I would be sharing with 7 or so people I hadn't yet met. I had secured a bunk bed for $85 a night via craigslist in a two bunk bed room with three other people. I never did spend much time at the condo and I didn't even meet all of the other people there, but the people I did talk to were all very nice and were volunteering for the festival. Sharing the room didn't turn out to be too bad, although next time I will definitely be bringing an eye mask and ear plugs.

The next morning I woke up, not quite in the swing of things. I laid in bed thinking to myself "Do I really have to get up? Do I really have to schlep myself and all my winter accessories, water bottles, local maps, and trail mix all over town to which I have no idea where I'm really going or what I'm really doing?" "Yes Michelle, you didn't spend all this money and drive across three states to lay in bed all day." So I got up.

I put on every single winter accessary I had brought and I walked outside completely bundled and ready for the worst. It was about 43 degrees and...really warm. I stripped off all of my accessories, unzipped my jacket, and walked a few minutes to the nearest shuttle stop. Since it was dark when I got into town the night before, it was the first time I could see how beautiful everything was.




At the shuttle stop, a festival representative asked me where I was going so he could get me on the right shuttle. I had a color coded map and was fully prepared to navigate myself around, but it was nice that there seemed to be people looking out for us.

After I got on the shuttle, I started to get excited; I could feel the energy of the people around me - we were at Sundance!