“Shooting on film felt like a straightforward way to connect with the past. I think film evokes the “old world” origins of Tolstoy’s story as well as a sense of film history that I wanted to tap into. 35mm also has a deeper, more emotional feeling, I find, and I wanted to soak up the sadness of the story and performances.”
As far as public reactions go, in both cases I was most struck by how much cell phone culture defines street life; most people we passed in the street had their faces down looking at the phones and barely noticed a woman with bare breasts passing by!
“At Sundance, we believe art can break through noise and polarization. In volatile times like these, democracy and storytelling aren’t separate – they’re inextricably linked,” said Keri Putnam, Sundance Institute’s Executive Director. “Congratulations to each and every one of tonight’s winners, and to all the extraordinary artists who joined us at the Festival.
DIRTY GOD purposefully takes a long, winding and jagged road toward Jade’s efforts to heal and find her own way to a new life she never asked for. This is not an easy redemption story that can take us comfortably across the finish line without the barest of emotional investments. Jade was assuredly not an angle cast down from the heavens, but rather, a working class beauty that is forced to overcome a fate she didn’t deserve.
There are many in the industry still clinging onto the theatrical experience, from filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, to companies like IMAX and Moviepass, but you still can’t really beat the experience of watching a movie, which some people have never even heard of, at a film festival. Hands down some of the best screenings I’ve ever attended have been at film festivals. In some cases, I’ve never had another chance to see those movies with an audience.
Irene Cho was a fucking force of nature, an unstoppable, and indefatigable hustling bowling ball of energy that made things happen, that stitched shit together, that produced and promoted both officially and unofficially. She was the real deal.
If you look him up on IMDb, you’ll see the biography that I wrote for him five years ago. It’s a bio pushing how much promise he had, with The Ben Stiller Show appearances, a Tom Arnold series, and a ton of commercials in a short period of time. It talks about the two short films he directed which both won a lot of awards in film fests in the San Diego area (he wasn’t that savvy about the film fest circuit to take them farther). And that’s where it pretty much ends.
“Dallas film audiences are among the most knowledgeable, diverse, and enthusiastic in the entire country,” said James Faust, Artistic Director of the Dallas Film Society. “Therefore, programming the Dallas International Film Festival is always an exercise in striking a balance by finding films that appeal to the savvy cinephile, and the weekend escape-seeking film fan, as well as everyone in between. This year, we have already had great success securing films that impressed us at other prominent film festivals around the world, to discovering brand new gems, which will make their debut right here at DIFF.”
the fact of the matter is that as much as I love independent film and celebrate it and would almost always choose it over studio fare, I still have a routine “violent reaction” to having overloaded on the Sundance/Slamdance stuff by going directly to movie comfort food. That means a by the numbers zombie movie, a doc of the National Lampoon, Tom Cruise and Matt Damon action fare
Is the Amazonianzation and Netflixication of independent film basically just the latest “reset” of what we used to think of as the hierarchy of studio films versus independent films?
