Festival life is rough. Robert Redford is pressed to defend Sundance's indie cred. Robert Ebert is surprisingly on his own, scrambling for supplies, denied even the simple pleasure of instant coffee and peanut butter. Tickets are hard to come by, box office hours inscrutable. American Hardcore director Paul Hardman is having nightmares. After three flights, Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet's suitcases arrived in Utah City broken. No wheels.

Wheels or not, Coixet's The Secret Life of Words is one of the films I'm anticipating most. Sarah Polley stars, and I've been a Sarah Polley nut since her adolescent turn as the wheelchair girl in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Polley also gave a devastatingly understated performance in Coixet's previous film My Life Without Me. In The Secret Life of Words, Polley plays a socially maladjusted nurse who takes care of a burn patient on an oil rig in the Irish sea — a plot I would be hard pressed to make up.