Art Feature

Missouri connections at Sundance 2007
by Russ Simmons

The snowy peaks of Park City, Utah may not seem a likely place to find throngs of filmmakers and movie buffs, but over the last 23 years the Sundance Film Festival has changed all that.

America's premier film festival is a venue for "independent" cinema (movies made outside of the Hollywood system.) The event took place Jan. 18—28, and attracted an estimated 53,000 moviegoers to the small ski resort town, not counting the throng of press, industry insiders and stargazers. Audiences viewed 196 feature films and countless shorts, and participated in workshops, panel discussions and (infamously) celebrity-laden parties.

Missouri-born filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky had her film, Hear and Now, screened at Sundance

Several films with Missouri connections were screened for film buffs and industry insiders, each hoping to nab distribution deals.

One of the more intriguing movies screened was the documentary, Banished. Largely filmed in the Show Me State, Banished focuses on the violent expulsion of African Americans from various US cities in the early 20th century.

Filmmaker Marco Williams dedicates a large portion of the film to the story of Pierce City, MO, where a number of African Americans were violently forced to leave the area in the 1920s. Locals confiscated their land and property, and the city remains predominately white.

Williams follows the difficulties that Charles Brown, Jr. encountered when he tried to have the body of his grandfather, James Cobb, exhumed from the Pierce City cemetery. His intention was to have the body buried in the family plot near Springfield.

Brown’s efforts were initially met with indignation and camouflaged racism. Through persistence (and most likely because a movie camera was present to record the events) he managed to accomplish some of his goals.

Another documentary partially filmed in Missouri is Girl 27, an excellent exposé about a Hollywood scandal and its lingering impact on an elderly woman some 65 years later.

Director David Stenn’s exhaustively researched movie tells the sad tale of Patricia Douglas, the victim of rape at an MGM salesmen’s convention in 1937. After going public and seeking to bring her attacker to justice, she endured the wrath of MGM, the horrors of the Los Angeles County court system and other numerous indignities.

The powerful movie studio managed to sweep the scandal under the rug and off the front pages, and the culprit was never indicted. Stenn makes a powerful case that this miscarriage of justice had a lingering effect that devastated Douglas for the rest of her life.

Missouri born filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky offered a documentary about her parents, one a former Washington University professor.

Hear and Now follows a physically and mentally draining journey that her mother and father took late in life. Brodsky’s parents, both of whom were born deaf, decided to get cochlear implants at age 65. The procedure, which restores partial hearing, offered the couple a potentially exciting new experience.

Brodsky filmed the couple as they prepared for the surgery, underwent the procedure and then followed them for a year afterward. The experience proved to be an emotional roller coaster. Hear and Now received the Sundance Audience Award for Best Documentary.

Former Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt is one of the talking heads participating in the documentary, For the Bible Tells Me So, a film dealing with homosexuality and the religious right. Gephardt’s daughter, Chrissy, is a lesbian who helped her father promote his candidacy for president to gay groups in 2004.

America Zombie, a “mockumentary” by MU graduate Grace Lee, screened her horror/comedy at Slamdance, an “alternative” festival to Sundance.

Grace Lee, a director who graduated from MU, screened her horror comedy, American Zombie, at the rival Slamdance festival. Slamdance is one of several “alternative” festivals that have sprung up in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival to take advantage of the presence of audiences and attending studio honchos.

Lee’s film is a “mockumentary” that looks at high-functioning zombies who are relegated to performing menial labor.

Aside from the aforementioned Hear and Now, the big winners at Sundance were the Mexican immigration drama Pedro Nuestro and Manda Bala, a documentary about crime and corruption in Brazil. Other films picking up various honors included In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the Apollo program and Grace is Gone, a drama starring John Cusack about a man whose wife, a soldier, is killed in Iraq.

From a financial standpoint, the big winner was Son of Rambow, a funny and sweet-natured memory tale about two British boys who make their own sequel to the Sylvester Stallone action movie, First Blood. It sold for a reported $8 million.

Elsewhere in Park City, Sundance audiences could enjoy celebrity-sighting ranging from the heady (festival founder Robert Redford) to the absurd (comic Tom Arnold trying to score some “swag” merchandise while covering the fest for The Tonight Show). Music lovers could enjoy concerts at the Music Café while film aesthetes and intellectuals could participate in lively panel discussions like “Space, A Guided Tour” featuring filmmakers, scientists and writers.

Although few of the films screened in Park City will achieve huge box-office success (Little Miss Sunshine is an exception to the rule, having earned over $60 million to date), Sundance provides independent filmmakers with the one thing they covet most of all: a chance.

Russ Simmons can be contacted at simmons.russ@gmail.com.