The Sundance Film Festival, which set up shop in Park City, Utah, this week, is more than a festival: It's a delicate balancing act. This is an institution that walks the line between two competing notions of what a celebration of cinema should be, straddling as best it can a gap that is especially evident this year.
What Sundance is eternally caught between is the Scylla and Charybdis of commerce and art. Its proximity to Hollywood and its success at premiering audience-friendly independent films (for instance, last year's "An Education" and "Precious") have led to perennial charges that the festival is not pure enough, not devoted enough to the strictures of high art that it was supposedly created to enforce and encourage.
You can easily see why Sundance worries. There is a big-business aspect to a festival that last year had 40,000 visitors and an economic impact for the state of Utah of $92.1 million. Not to mention the cachet of being held in a party town that, filling a need no one previously knew existed, recently opened what's been called "the nation's first ski-in, ski-out distillery."
But to anyone who goes to Sundance and sees the films, those accusations don't make a lot of sense. Year in and year out, the festival - especially the dramatic competition section - is overloaded with undeniably noncommercial (and not necessarily artistic) films that don't have a prayer of getting a theatrical release.
But the accusation of worshipping Mammon is such a feared one that this year's program guide fairly shouts on the cover, "This Is Your Guide to Cinematic Rebellion."
And John Cooper, the festival's new director, has not only said all the right things about not being "swayed by the marketability of a film," but he also has done away with the tradition of an official opening-night film. He also has launched two new sections, one directed at art and the other, recognizing the Sundance inevitable, toward popularity.
The section called NEXT is devoted to films made with very little money that are meant to epitomize "creative risk-taking."
The Spotlight section, on the other hand, repurposed and renamed from the old Spectrum, will show, among other things, films that have proved popular at other festivals. Here can be found Jacques Audiard's knockout "A Prophet," the most universally admired film at Cannes, as well as the Italian "I Am Love," a rich family drama that is both a sensual celebration of bourgeois pleasures and a showcase for Tilda Swinton.
