The controversy over Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse character in “Swiss Army Man.” The hubbub over celebrities being a mere 30 minutes away from campus. The crowds desperate to get into that one documentary getting all the praise.
With all this going on, it’s often easy to miss the heart of the Sundance Film Festival — the showcase and celebration of independent films. Highlighting diverse groups of people from around the world, each year the festival brings an array of new stories, often controversially, to our backyard. Because of this annual change of faces and focus and because most of the movies showing are world premieres, Brian Patrick, professor of film and media arts at the U, said it’s nearly impossible to predict how each film will do until the festival concludes.
Patrick has taught a course centered on Sundance for over three decades and has been attending the festival since the first few in the 1970s. While he didn’t have any specifics about this week’s upcoming films, he said it’s possible to start analyzing the overall focus of the festival.
For instance, he said a few years ago there were a lot of films focused on queer and transgender issues. Now there are movies more passionately exploring guns, violence and police brutality.
“The festival is interesting in the sense that you kind of get the latest, almost world/mental concept of what people are thinking and what they’re thinking about and how they’re trying to solve issues,” Patrick said. “There’s really no other event that displays these kind of moral ideas and opinions like the film festival can do. It really is the greatest and latest embodiment of world ideas and opinion.”
After a brief glimpse at the short blurbs for the films showing this year, patterns in ideas start to emerge. One is the struggle for an independent identity despite social pressures to conform, explored in films such as the drama “Spa Night,” which depicts a young Korean-American exploring his sexuality. Another theme centers on the best way to deal with trauma, pictured on a grand scale in “The Birth of a Nation,” telling the stories of one of the largest slave revolts in United States history, and in quieter ways like handling the slow death of a loved one in “Other People.”
“Sundance, there is kind of a love-hate relationship with it. You hate the crowds and ticket prices and standing in line and the expense of it all, but it is an opportunity to be at the forefront of it all,” Patrick said. “Everyone is different and we’re lucky to have it in our back door otherwise we’d have to go to places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles to get these kinds of ideas.”
Patrick said he encourages students to take advantage of the close proximity of the festival and some of the cheaper showings in and around Salt Lake City.
“Many of the films embody that concept of ordinary people, ordinary families and ordinary stories and they really wouldn’t normally be made in Hollywood,” he said. “It’s not the next ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Fury Road,’ it’s not going to make millions of dollars, but it should still be told. These little films about little people.”
@Ehmannky