After ten slightly tumultuous days, the Sundance Film Festival is over for another year, with around 30 of its participating films now snapped up for distribution. Perhaps the festival’s organisers are breathing a sigh of relief now that it’s over and done – it’s been widely reported that this year’s festival had both a grim and chaotic feel, with record snowfalls in Park City, Utah impeding attendance at opening weekend, several visiting celebrities falling ill, and the death of indie film producer Bingham Ray at the age of 57 announced during the festival.
Image by Ben Richardson, Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival
Still, maybe this is just par for the course. Sundance has always had a reputation as a bit of a rough-and-ready film festival, with all the celebrity glitz and glamour tempered by the festival’s determined focus on quirky, challenging independent films. This traditional emphasis is accurately reflected in this year’s big winners, which also demonstrate the 2012’s festival twin tendencies toward stories that are either charmingly fanciful or grittily real.
The Grand Jury Drama Prize was awarded to Beasts of the Southern Wild, a surreal, mythological fantasy adventure that sounds fantastically absurd in its description, yet inspired some of the keenest buzz of the festival and launched a bidding war amongst several of the largest distributors. The film follows 6-year-old Hushpuppy, a poor girl from a southern delta who tries to save her ill father Wink from the snow monsters unleashed from melting glaciers on the brink of the Apocalypse. It sounds a bit batty, but has haunting parallels with contemporary concerns over child poverty and global warming.
A similarly creative take on fantasy subjects can be seen in other festival favourites, such as the clever Safety Not Guaranteed, winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. In this unconventional approach to science fiction, three magazine employees attempt to track down the writer of a classified ad who is looking for a partner for time travel. Another delightful futuristic romp sees Frank Langella play a cantankerous ex-jewel thief who is assisted in his old age by a carer robot in Robot & Frank, co-winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.
On the documentary side, the key films provide a darkly thought-provoking picture of American society in particular. The Grand Jury Documentary Prize went to The House I Live In, a controversial take on the futility (and potentially misguidedness) of America’s War on Drugs. The winner of the Audience Award for a U.S. Documentary went to a film with a similarly disturbing subject matter: The Invisible War looks at widespread instances of rape and sexual assault in the U.S. military. Meanwhile, festival opener The Queen of Versailles charts the story of a wealthy Florida couple who set out to build the largest mansion in the country, only to be thwarted and effectively ruined by the global financial crash.
The Surrogate - image courtesy of Sundance Film Festival
Still, not all is hopelessly gloomy. The film most likely to achieve more mainstream success this year is The Surrogate, a poignant and touchingly humorous tale of a thirty-something man obliged to live with an iron lung, who engages a professional sex surrogate to help him lose his virginity. John Hawkes’s portrayal of the disabled man generated a fair bit of Oscar buzz, and the film is likely to give a welcome boost to female lead Helen Hunt’s stalled career.
The 2012 Sundance Festival also channelled the Bridesmaids phenomenon with a number of female-centric comedies, which undoubtedly provided a bit of relief to those who had incorporated the festival in their otherwise light-hearted USA holidays. Bachelorette boasts the strongest comparison with Bridesmaids and a starry cast that includes Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher, but it received lukewarm reviews. Better options are 2 Days in New York – Julie Delpy’s follow-up to the well-received 2 Days in Paris – and Lay the Favorite, a Vegas casino romp starring Rebecca Hall as a stripper hired to help beat the house.
See the full list of winners here. And here’s director Benh Zeitlin talking about his film, Beasts of the Southern Wild:
Which Sundance Film Festival choices are you most excited to see? Let us know in the comments below.
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January 31, 2012
Movies