In theory, Tinseltown should be on tenterhooks ahead of tomorrow’s Oscar nominations. In fact, attention is focused 1,005km east, on Park City, Utah, where the candidates for next year’s Academy Awards are enjoying their first public airing, in front of ski-booted and suited stars such as Pierce Brosnan, Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Williams, Paul Rudd and Jason Reitman.
Sundance, the festival established by Robert Redford in 1978, earned its spurs as an incubator for films which would go on to be big hitters at the following year’s Oscars. But while that reputation has become more erratic with fiction films, its form with documentaries is still unsurpassed.
This year’s festival, which began on Thursday, is eager to repeat the trick of last year, when its non-fiction premieres populated half the Oscar nomination shortlist. Indeed, it has retooled its program to do so. A new Documentary Premieres sidebar has been created to showcase less recognizable nonfiction filmmakers — a move prompted by Sundance’s popularity with big-name directors, who jostle for the top spots in the schedule.
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This year’s coveted opening night showcase went to Project Nim, the latest from British documentarian James Marsh, whose 2008 film Man on Wire, about tightrope-walker Philippe Petit’s wobbly odyssey between the Twin Towers, won the Oscar after premiering at Sundance. Nim chronicles the life of a chimp that was taught sign language and raised like a child. The experiment itself met with mixed, mucky results, but Nim had the film critics in raptures.
“I think [Sundance] is the beginning of a film’s life,” said Marsh. “I think you will see some great documentary films this time, and I’m sure some of them will be very, very present in the next awards season.”
Other blockbuster documentaries on the radar include the latest from Morgan Spurlock, whose Sundance premiered fast-food expose Super Size Me was Oscar nominated in 2004. This time he’s presenting The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, about product placement, while Britain’s Kevin Macdonald, whose career has straddled documentary (One Day in September), fiction (The Last King of Scotland) and the lucrative seam in between (Touching the Void), will present Life in a Day, a crowd-sourced experiment culled from thousands of hours of camcorder footage shot on July 24 last year.
Fiction features whipping up press include Red State, Kevin Smith’s horror film about a world overrun by Christian fundamentalists, Higher Ground, the directing debut of Up in the Air star Vera Farmiga, and The Loved Ones, a wedding farce with Demi Moore.
Yet the supremacy of the documentary is surely confirmed by the news that one of the hottest tickets in town is Constance Marks’ Sesame Street study Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey. As wags have already taken to saying: only a muppet would miss it.
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