I love Sundance! It’s the only time of year I’m able to inventory all my dishware, silverware, mugs, tumblers, socks, briefs, turtlenecks, Levis, gloves, mufflers, ball caps, film-tickets, Powerbars, water jugs, film guides, and other flotsam and jetsam associated with the festival.
For some reason they’re easier to count when, for days on end, they get piled high in the sink, spread across the floor-space from one room to the other, or imbedded somewhere deep down in the Precambrian strata of what I jokingly refer to as my dining-room table.
Space-time becomes warped, stretched, folded, spindled, and mutilated beyond all recognition. Your dreams, nightmarish all, are of riding on a shuttle going nowhere fast, a streetcar named “Despair.” Somewhere, deep down in the hallucination where Freud promised “imaginary gratification of unconscious wishes,” the film is starting without you.
It always works out, of course. There you are, once again sitting in the dark of a theater, anxiously awaiting artistically configured light to play across the screen. Your pulse quickens. The game is afoot! For some quite-sound reasons, you chose this film and, in the moment, you recall the “why.”
My first-ever “opening night” is a case in point. A documentary dealing with the music career and social-justice activism of Harry Belafonte sounded too good to pass up once the opportunity arose. But, as is usually the case when I think I’m bringing a lot to the table on a particular issue, there turned out to be a bunch about Harry of which I was not all that hip.
He turned up at, seemingly, every meaningful cultural crossroads of his time not coincidentally, like Forrest Gump, but purposefully, leading the charge. Very few crux moves were attempted during those times without Harry: Selma, Memphis, Montgomery, Soweto, Birmingham, untold prisons, and, the scariest place of all, segregated Hollywood, USA. J. Edgar Hoover kept a rather large dossier on him. If that isn’t validation for truly patriotic activism, I don’t know what is.
This year I finally bought a ticket for a screening at the Temple Theater and, somewhat timidly, jumped through the necessary shuttle hoops to arrive on time at the no-parking venue. Other than the fact that the wind chill at The Yard park-and-ride bus stop along Kearns Boulevard was colder than a well-digger’s bottom line, things went swimmingly.
Suffice to say that the Temple Theater turned out to be a very cool venue with enough elbow room to negotiate the quick turns required when viewing archival Formula One racing footage without running your adjacent seat mate into the wall. “Senna” is as riveting and exhilarating as any documentary you’d ever want to see.
The Rose Wagner Theater in Salt Lake was the next stop on the itinerary. No-hassle parking near the venue is what makes Sundance in Salt Lake so user friendly. “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” while more balanced than other attempts to chronicle radical environmentalism, still left a taste in your mouth that it was going to take much more than petitions and emails to save our forestland.
Week One of the festival wrapped at my single favorite venue, the Screening Room at Sundance Resort. The first film, “Knuckle,” portrayed a couple of sub-clans of Irish gypsies known as “the Travelers” and their traditional manner of settling disputes by having a member of each family meet for a bare-knuckle showdown.
Ah, the Irish! You gotta love ’em! The Hatfields and McCoys got nothing on the long-feuding Quinn-McDonaghs and the Joyces. Things got so brutish that I had to run by the Owl Bar afterward to check on the Bears and Packers and grab a quick refreshment.
My final film of the week proved to be the most engaging. “The Last Mountain,” a heartbreaking tale of how the myth of the “coal industry as a friend to America” is held in place by corporate lobbyists with politicians in their pocket while the industry heaps total environmental destruction and deadly pollution upon Appalachia’s families, will no doubt stick to my ribs the longest.
Interacting with filmmakers, of course, is what Sundance is all about, so when Director Bill Haney was joined by Bobby Kennedy Jr. for the post-film Q & A, the event developed a cachet of instant meaningfulness. Suffice to say, the passion level in the room grew exponentially with the repartee. Ah Sundance! Can’t wait for Week Two!
Now where’s that other sock?
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.