Park City Dispatch. 3.

It seems that almost everyone comes to Sundance looking for trends, assuming that the festival will shape the course of independent film for a year to come. Here are three that seem clear enough.

More films at the festival are getting more political. Take everything from the Darfur expose in the voice of an ex-marine, The Devil Came on Horseback [site], to the opening film, Chicago 10, about the brutal suppression of anti-war riots at the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of the 1968 and the circus of a trial a year later.

Beside the political trend, there remains a group of films that push at the boundaries of sex that can be shown on the screen - or even discussed. Zoo, by Robinson Devor, certainly keeps this tendency active and growing, in its meditative inquiry into the men who organized sex parties with horses in Enumclaw, outside Seattle, which led to the death of one of them in 2005, when his colon was perforated in an encounter with an Arabian stallion. (The horse lived, but is not at the festival to do press. I can just imagine the "dinner" in his honor.)

Next is the obvious trend that the festival is growing far beyond the capacity of Park City to accommodate it, whether the problem is cost, lodging, parking, or the congestion on a Main Street that some are now just calling Bourbon Street. Limo-lock is now as much a part of the festival as anything else. Traffic is often reduced to a motionless snarl, in which buses transporting filmgoers packed in with their faces pushed up against the windows just stand still. We all know that prices have gotten so high here that it would be cheaper to have a festival like this one in Monaco or Palm Beach. Yet Park City, I'm told, is contracted to be the home of the Sundance Film Festival through 2018. Who made that decision? A multiplex of 12 theaters, which every little town on the prairie in the US seems to have, would be an obvious answer. Don't hold your breath.

A few films to consider.

The Devil Came on Horseback by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern takes its title from a book by the former marine Brian Steidle and his sister Gretchen Steidle which is due to be published later this year. Steidle went to Sudan as a monitor for the African Union. He took his camera and recorded what he saw, which was death inflicted on villagers in vast areas by the Arab Janjiweed militias. Steidle makes it clear that the militias are paid, armed and commanded by the Sudanese government. It couldn't be any clearer when Sudanese planes bomb villages before the militias enter to rape, pillage and burn. Anyone foolish enough to believe that government's public argument that the killers are acting autonomously, or that Sudanese courts have the inclination to punish mass murders, won't believe it after seeing this film. Once again, genocide happens, and the world stands on the sidelines. Steidle's pictures are gruesome, yet some of the cinema here is stunning in its spareness, in its silvery images of water, which seems to be the resource in least supply in this region besides truth-telling courage, and even in the generic footage of Steidle trying to get anyone in Washington to listen.

Zoo continues to be a film that everyone knows about, but few know. Who hasn't heard of the movie about the guy who gets killed after having sex with a horse? Robinson Devor was at Sundance in 2005 with Police Beat co-written with Seattle theorist/scribe Charles Mudede, about an unlikely Senegalese cop on a beat in the city that brought you Jimi Hendrix and Bill Gates. He's back with Zoo, which is the term by which practitioners of sex with animals, zoophiles, refer to themselves. Don't call it bestiality. There's real affection on both sides of the relationship, they say. If you want the tabloid side of it, or the everyday journalism, turn to the Seattle Post, where the stories on the incident were the most-read articles in the paper's history. It makes you wonder whether there isn't a mass-market audience for a film of this kind, which tries to humanize the men who have been maligned and prosecuted. They've had to turn people away from screening sin Park City, where lots of people can afford horses. Now that this film has opened up the conversation on human-animal sex, and opened up the jokes - was the horse wearing a condom? - I'm surprised at how many people are conversant on the subject, with strong opinions. Broadening the debate once again at Sundance.

One film that I wouldn't have seen anywhere else was at Slamdance, still a rival to Sundance after all these years, and still as disorganized as ever on Main Street, and just as uncomfortable, if you sit through an entire screening, as I did last night. The film is Cold Prey [site], a Norwegian horror movie, and a huge hit there. Five snowboarders set out for an Easter weekend in the mountains, and when one of then breaks his leg after tearing through fresh snow, they hole up in an abandoned hotel. It's haunted, in case you haven't guessed, and the huge murderer/ghost puts them away one by one with a pickaxe. In its borrowing from The Shining and Psycho, this film isn't original, but the acting by the young cast of unknowns - some of them unknown inside Norway - is superbly nuanced. (The director, Roar Uthaug, told me that the Norwegian public is so accustomed to seeing the same actors in its films, that it's actually an asset to be making films without over-exposed stars. Tell that to Hollywood, or to Sundance.) This is a director to watch, if he moves beyond entertainment, or even if he doesn't.

Posted by dwhudson at January 22, 2007 8:03 AM