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.
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
On May 2, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), at a meeting in support of Taipei city councilors at party headquarters, compared President William Lai (賴清德) to Hitler. Chu claimed that unlike any other democracy worldwide in history, no other leader was rooting out opposing parties like Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). That his statements are wildly inaccurate was not the point. It was a rallying cry, not a history lesson. This was intentional to provoke the international diplomatic community into a response, which was promptly provided. Both the German and Israeli offices issued statements on Facebook
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS