Every year, Sundance outdoes its extravagant film banquet of the prior year’s feast, or else, as filmmaking becomes more accessible to emerging artists, it correspondingly grows more substantive and satisfying.
Inside the Sundance ASCAP Cafe green room, Jeremy Messersmith and his band warm up with persistent, luxurious harmonies. Despite my fascination with melodious repetition, my eyes target the blonde dude sitting easy by the window. His blue-eyed boyish looks defy all 31 years Wikipedia credits to his name.
Naturally the first weekend of Sundance 2014 kicked off with the most discernible Canadian diversion: hockey.
There’s an inescapable landing between unimpeded childhood and the grown-up world with all of its resident angst and constraint, and it’s often aptly coined as the summer when everything changes. That middle place is Moonrise Kingdom.
At a recent reception in Park City, Utah, Chinese Canadian director and screenwriter, Yung Chang wasn’t hard to spot, wearing a red fundraiser toque and flanked by two prominent cast members from his most recent documentary, China Heavyweight.
Slamdance, the lesser known but feisty film festival rival of Sundance–running concurrently along with that giant predecessor–is emerging as one of the best platforms for independent filmmakers worldwide. Although the Slamdance cinematic scope may have branched out monumentally over the past few years its mantra, “By Filmmakers, For Filmmakers” remains forever unchanged.