Over the past decade, curators have come to hold increasingly important roles in contemporary art and society. With an over-abundance of media content, the professional curator occupies an arguably more central position in cultural creation today than the producers themselves. Film festivals have long relied on these arbiters of culture to select the very best of new cinema for their programs. Last week in Park City there was a sense that the best of independent cinema wasn’t being selected for the main stages of Sundance. It was in the micro-cinemas of Sundance’s fifteen-year-old bastard child the Slamdance Film Festival and the New Frontiers section of Sundance that one could find ground-breaking cinema. It was programmers like Slamdance’s Paul Sbrizzi and New Frontiers’ Mike Plante that were introducing audiences to the most exciting and original work at the festivals.
New Frontiers’ was established in 2000 by Sundance to showcase new media and experimental cinema. Mike Plante’s New Frontiers program was a playful attempt at creating a community of filmmakers through the simple act of buying lunch. Titled LunchFilm, Plante took filmmakers out for a meal in exchange for a short film made for the cost of the lunch. The most impressive work in his program was Ben Russell’s Trypps, part surrealist poem, part ethnographic documentary, the film was shot on location in a Maroon village in Suriname and looks like the beginning of a Tarkovskyian masterpiece.
Slamdance, like the Salon des Refuses in Fin-du-Siècle Paris, was formed by filmmakers rejected by Sundance with the goal of creating a venue for genuine indie cinema. Paul Sbrizzi’s Slamdance short selections were superb in part due to his almost fanatical curatorial integrity. “It’s my dream to be able to personally watch every single film that is submitted,” Paul said, “I don’t want to let any gems slip by.” This would be a herculean feat considering that Slamdance receives thousands of submissions each year. “If you watch a hundred shorts all the way through it can be depressing because you might not find a single good one,” Sbrizzi said, “but if you watch six hundred shorts, it starts to get exciting.” This zealous integrity is what makes Slamdance so respected amongst festivals.
Some Slamdance short highlights included the grand prize-winning narrative short film Princess Margaret Blvd. by Kazik Radwanski, a subjective portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease. Antonio Mendez’s Time and Again, is a Dardenne brothers-influenced gritty and unsentimental tale of a Mexican factory worker in urban New Jersey. And Jon Rafman’s voice-over essay City Girls shot on the streets of Montreal and inspired by Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad takes you into the mind of a man tortured by deja vu. Expressing tensions between the romantic and the ironic, Rafman weaves a tale of Russian-mail-order brides, nostalgic cartoon shows, and unrequited love.
With the emergence of indiewood culture in the 90s (after Miramax was bought by Disney and Fox Searchlight was born), the Sundance Kid lost the outlaw status he once had. And so authentic indie film culture moved into the makeshift theatres, basements, and hotel conference rooms of Park City where a new breed of rebel cinema is forming with the help of a few talented curators who won’t let their selection standards be corrupted by the industry’s tastes.
- Still from Jon Rafman’s City Girls
