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.
Photo: REUTERS
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.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
RSS