Sundance Day #4

Today was my last day in Park City. I started the day off by going to two panels at New Frontier - "Web Content - Where are the Big Ideas for Small Screens?" and "Meet the Sundance Filmmakers."



In the second panel, three different filmmakers showed clips from their movies and talked about them. One film in particular that I would have loved to have seen but it was sold out was the documentary We Live in Public, which went on to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary.


It was shot over a 10 year span of various people living their lives in front of the camera, and edited from over 5,000 hours of footage (doing the math, I figured that it would take you over 208 days, 24 hours a day, just to watch all the footage!). More than just exploitative reality entertainment, the film serves as a cautionary tale to the role that technology plays in our lives.

After that, I caught the last half of a panel at Queer Lounge called "Navigating Hollywood with GLBT Content." They showed the trailer for a new lifetime movie with Sigourney Weaver called Prayers for Bobby which is based on a true story of a gay rights crusader whose teenage son committed suicide due to her religious intolerance.


Despite the generic-feeling of the plot, I actually got teary eyed just from watching the trailer! (although I made sure that none of my fellow butches saw me)

After that, I went to a shorts screening at New Frontier called Lunch Films (not officially part of the Sundance programming - just an event that one of the Sundance lounges sponsored). The idea behind Lunch Films is basically that a filmmaker is taken out to lunch, and in return he/she makes a short film for the cost of the lunch. Rules and inspirations are written out on a napkin contract. I don't know if the films have to be experimental or not, but all of them were; a few were quite good, others were...I don't want to say horrible, but well - not that enjoyable. But I love the concept of Lunch Films, and that the founder spends his own money commissioning films on a budget. He tours around the country with his collection, screening it at various theaters.


That evening, I had two Sundance screenings to attend - a shorts program and Helen, a feature staring Ashley Judd, whose character deals with severe depression.


Although I can appreciate a good gut-wrenching movie, it just didn't grab me and pull me in the way I think it should have. I found the movie a little boring, like it was a one-note tune playing over and over (i.e. she's depressed and it sucks). However, during the Q&A I could tell that many people in the audience were very affected by it. It reminded me of the movie When a Man Loves a Woman where Meg Ryan plays an alcoholic, although I thought that movie was much more powerful.