LETTER: The Verdict at Sundance: Debuts on Difficult Subjects

by Elvis Mitchell
New York Times
January 27, 2003

PARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 26 - It was hard not to be amused by one element that ran through most of the films at this year's Sundance Film Festival here: smoking. It was in the shorts and the feature-length movies, in the dramatic and the documentary films. There was so much contemplative
dragging on cigarettes amid operatic shafts of backlighting that Brown & Williamson missed a bet by not signing on as a corporate sponsor.

When the smoke cleared, the winners of this year's jury grand prizes were both debuts connected by deft filmmaking technique employed to drive home difficult material.

The director Andrew Jarecki's first feature, "Capturing the Friedmans," received the documentary grand prize. It shrewdly weaves the American middle-class obsession with documenting innocuous daily life on film and now videotape into a grim, watchable wormhole narrative about a family's descent into self-denial, lies and abuse.

And the dramatic competition grand prize went to "American Splendor," the adaptation of Harvey Pekar's growly, sweat-stained autobiographical underground comic book. (Mr. Pekar's all-elbow adventures set the tone for comics like Dan Clowes's "Ghost World," which beat "American Splendor" to the screen.) This is the first fiction effort from the documentary filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, and some of it is acted, with Paul Giamatti as Harvey and Hope Davis as his equally querulously combative wife, Joyce, and some of it has the real-life counterparts commenting on the action.

The audience award winners had something in common as well; both garnered multiple citations. The documentary audience award went to "My Flesh and Blood," Jonathan Karsh's film on the even-keeled Susan Tom and her noisy, happy brood of adopted disabled children; Mr. Karsh's work got him the directing award, too. "The Station Agent," the writer and director Tom McCarthy's vision of an eccentric ad hoc family that grows out of the low-key, charismatic powers of a train-obsessed loner of a dwarf, won the dramatic audience award. Mr. McCarthy's script for "The Station Agent" won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

The actress Patricia Clarkson was singled out for the Special Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance for her work in "The Station Agent" and three other films; it almost seemed as if her movies outnumbered the audience. One of them, "All the Real Girls," the writer and director David Gordon Green's second film, was selected for a Special Jury Prize for Emotional Truth, as was "What Alice Found" by the director A. Dean Bell.

The documentary "What I Want My Words to Do to You" was chosen for the Freedom of Expression Award. "The Murder of Emmett Till" and "A Certain Kind of Death" were the documentary jury's choices for special jury prizes. The Excellence in Cinematography Awards honored the documentary "Stevie" and the dramatic film "Quattro Noza."

Visual stylization - and smoking - was certainly evident in the evocative winner of the jury prize in short filmmaking, Stefan Nadelman's "Terminal Bar," in which a series of black-and-white photos spell out the history of that well-known Manhattan dive. The pictures created a Sundance staple - an extended, dysfunctional family of loners - which could also be detected in the majority of films and award winners. The dysfunctional family interaction was the pained heartbeat of Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," the winner of the dramatic directing award.

Frazzled family dynamics were so much a part of the festival that it even extended outside the pictures on
view. During the acoustic part of an invitation-only concert by Beck, the continual chatter was so distracting
that he huffed, "I was going to announce the name of my next song, but I don't want to interrupt anybody's
conversation," the kind of stinging remark generally heard at button-pushing family dinners. (As usual, the crosstalk went on anyway.)

A family in crisis was also the subject of the World Cinema Audience Award winner, "Whale Rider." Written and directed by Niki Caro, "Whale Rider" is the story of a willful Maori girl (the solemn, magnetic Keisha Castle-Hughes) determined to splinter her grandfather's blunt, dismissive chauvinism. The spike in attendance at this year's Sundance guaranteed audiences for the world cinema features and the festival's new category, world documentary, a strong offshoot that included important movies like "Balseros," a long-term view
of Cuban refugees.

Extending the scope of the festival is a noteworthy ambition. What might also serve the festival is to have
juried awards for films by foreign directors, since the world cinema section has often spotlighted intensely
idiosyncratic movies.

It seems odd that American directors are eligible for juried prizes at festivals around the world, yet
foreign-made pictures aren't granted the same consideration at one of the most important festivals in North America.

Juried prizes prompt audiences to see the films; they want to know what jurors - like the directors Nanette Burstein, Avon Kirkland, David O. Russell, and the actors Tilda Swinton and Forest Whitaker - are encouraging with their votes. Making the world categories part of the Sundance jury excitement seems vital, especially since inclusion and tolerance should be part of any New World Order. It would be a great way to clear some of the stale, obscuring smoke from the air.