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In 2006, Flavorpill covered the Sundance Film Festival firsthand, dispatching daily video and blog posts from Park City. Relive some of the highlights here.

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The Films

Shortcut to Sundance

Sundance is all about access this year, which is good news for videophiles like ourselves. Courtesy of Adobe, you can now view over 45 of the short films that were in competition this year, including award winners Bugcrush, Preacher with an Unknown God, and Before Dawn. All you need is the latest Flash plugin, and they load lickety-split.

Fireside Cineaste

Just before we hopped on a plane back to the big city yesterday, Lisa and I sat down to fully embrace Utah's mountaineering metaphors with a fireside chat about a handful of the movies that we both saw at Sundance. Click through for our Ebert & Roeper-style take on Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's The Trials of Darryl Hunt, and Brian Hill's Songbirds. Can you tell I'm concentrating really hard on my posture?

See for Yourself

Throughout the festival, the DivX crew worked hard to amass as many high-quality trailers as possible for Sundance 2006 entries. To complement our written and video coverage, you can now watch trailers for over 45 of this year's films, including Friends with Money, Steel City, Sherrybaby, Little Miss Sunshine, and Thin.

Sundance 2006 Winners

The big surprise of last night's awards ceremony — aside from the crazy range of resort-town high-occasion garb — was that in both the documentary and dramatic categories, the grand jury awarded their prizes to the same films that won the audience awards: God Grew Tired of Us, the documentary about Sudanese children; and Quinceañera, the story of a 15-year-old Mexican girl, shot by two honky gay male directors.

Frankly, we were a little surprised: Although both films were quite good — and the Quinceañera team were so goofily grateful that you couldn't begrudge them a thing — we'd hoped that either Thin or The Trials of Darryl Hunt would've taken home one of the unwieldy glass squares they call an award around these here parts. Other big winners of the night: the documentary Iraq in Fragments' James Longley took home awards for editing, cinematography, and directing. Not so shabby, James!

We were most gratified that American Blackout was awarded a special jury prize for documentary; that the very endearing So Yong Kim received the Independent Vision award; and that In the Pit, about Mexico City construction workers, took home best world documentary. As the directing/production team took the stage, the audience whistled Mexi style, and Juan Carlos Rulfo screamed, "This is for the workers!"

Overly commercialized or no, moments like that are what Sundance will always be about. A complete list of the winners is posted after the jump.

[KEEP READING...]

Slamdance Winners

Slamdance has announced the winners of its 2006 festival. Lynn Shelton's We Go Way Back, "a sly and tender depiction of one young woman's journey of self-rediscovery," snagged the Grand Jury award. The Special Jury Recognition went to The Guatemalan Handshake, a mystery about a vanished demolition derby driver by writer/director Todd Rohal. A film about Sierra Leone, Philippe Diaz' The Empire in Africa, won Best Documentary, and the Documentary Jury Recognition went to the controversial Forgiving Dr. Mengele, by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh. Tim Skousen's The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature.

The official site has the complete list of awards, including the Screenplay Competition and the Sparky Award for Global Anarchy. Best-of screenings are held today in Salt Lake City, and winning films will come to New York and LA soon.

Award #1: The Sundance Sloan Prize

The House of Sand, directed by Andrucha Waddington and written by Elena Soarez, won this year's Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The award, which goes to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology, comes with a pretty nice cash reward: $20,000. Waddington's second feature doesn't take place on a spaceship or a computerized wasteland; the epic story about three generations of Brazilian women is set on a remote sand dune. "A poetic meditation on the physics of time and the biology of human variation," pronounced the jury panel. The award will be presented in Park City tonight. Along with a whole host of others.

Distracted Projectionist, Not Body Thetans, to Blame For Missing Katie Sex Scene

Director Jason Reitman was not pleased when he realized during the screening of his film Thank You for Smoking that a brief sex scene between Katie Holmes and Aaron Eckhart had gone missing. "We were sitting there in shock," Reitman said. "But the audience didn't seem to notice or care." Was an overprotective Tom Cruise behind the mysterious, unapproved edit? As it turns out, the answer was rather less exciting: the scene comes at the end of the reel, and an absentminded projectionist had simply sliced it off. It can only be a matter of time before the missing 12 seconds appear on Fark.

Bouncin' Round the Echo Chamber

What can anybody possibly add to David Hudson's exhaustive Park City Roundup, which faithfully lists all reviews of Sundance films that have popped up so far?

How about a list of movies I'm now dying to see:

- This Film is Not Yet Rated, because the censorship doc got an NC-17 from the ratings board it's investigating.
- The Hawk is Dying, because you can't go wrong with Paul Giamatti, Michael Pitt, and Michelle Williams doing Harry Crews. (Or can you?)
- The Ground Truth, because Iraq Vets deserve all the attention they can get.
- Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That, because any concert film that makes you feel like you "smell like weed and spilled beer" must be doing something right.

Eat My Shorts

It's not easy being a stay-at-home guest blogger. While Lisa and Jocelyn are asking celebs about their boots, knocking back vast amounts of ridicitinis at glamorous premieres, and seeing movies about handjobs, we're mainlining RSS feeds and dreaming about Ashley Judd. But there are three things that make our fate bearable. First of all, I prefer my martinis without sake, lychee, or the faint hint of cucumber. Secondly, thanks to global warming, NYC is experiencing a way-early spring this year, so my boots are made by Birkenstock. And finally, following the meta-coverage without actually seeing any of the movies doesn't feel quite as desperate once you discover that you can watch selections of the short film program online. The majority of shorts have now premiered and are available, more will follow tomorrow. My favorite so far? The Tribe, a history of the Jewish people and the Barbie doll, narrated by Peter Coyote.

Sundance Suffering and Sarah Polley

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.

Unsafe at 24fps

Ralph Nader and Al Gore refuse to fade gently into the night. Sharing headlines with Jennifer Aniston, they are coming to Sundance. The former presidential foes are trying on new hats: movie stars. Nader is the subject of Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan's An Unreasonable Man, which painstakingly documents (we're talking a 155 minute run time) the liberal Green party crusader's early days. Davis Guggenheim's far shorter activist doc An Inconvenient Truth chronicles Al Gore life-long mission to reverse global warming. Hope they won't spoil each other's chances — again.

Going to the Alpha Dogs? Uh, Maybe Not

Originally, Nick Cassavetes (yes, John's son) thought he'd sidestepped the legal problems plaguing his film Alpha Dogs, Sundance 2006's closing night film. Based on the real-life story of suburban pseudo thugs who ended up committing a real-life murder, the helmer dumped an additional $500,000 on reshoots when it became clear his research had been a little too thorough.

But even so, defense attorneys for James Hollywood, who's on trial for the kidnapping and execution of then 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, think the story, which stars Justin Timberlake and Bruce Willis, hits so close to home that it could sway the jury. The bottom line? They want it pulled at least until Hollywood is tried. (Ah, if only that sentence had multiple meanings!) Today's Times calls Cassavetes' struggle a "a cautionary tale for writer-directors thinking of tackling a breaking news story as their next subject." Maybe it's really just a cautionary tale about casting wannabe R&B singers as wannabe thugs.

My Top Ten Cents

I never really fully grasped the old writer's saw "kill your babies" until it came time to map out my Sundance screening schedule. With 120 offerings, a lady can view but so many. I've been fortunate enough to catch some sneak previews of a few (the estimable Friends with Money and Somebodies), so I've already knocked a few off my list. Still, if I had my druthers, my screening schedule of 30 would really include all 120. Sleep is so 2005.

So herein lies my Top Ten. Do understand that I deliberately didn't overlap too much with Jocelyn. And that for every selection here, three babies died in the bathwater. At least! [KEEP READING...]

The Jury Is Out

You can't give out prizes without judgment. Sundance has selected a dazzling lineup of filmmakers, cinematographers, and actors as jurors for the festival — Alexander Payne, Miguel Arteta, Audrey Wells, Terence Howard, and Thomas Vinterberg to name a few. The festival's winners will be announced on January 28th. Here's a complete list of jurors.

Calling It Like We Haven't Seen It... Yet

With some 120 features screening at Sundance this year, and a raft of "descriptive" press blurbs that read like pitches, it seems like a near-Sisyphean task just to get a handle on all that's on offer, much less distill it to a neat li'l Top Ten. But that's what we're here for, right? And as I emerge from a Film Guide-surfing frenzy with this list, I note a few encouraging trends: the amount of promising films that focus on women or minorities seems unusually — and hearteningly — high, and the documentary competition pool is particularly strong.

But without further ado, here's what's making my cinephile's heart go pitter-patter in anticipation:

1. The Science of Sleep (Premieres)
After Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all Michel Gondry projects now go to the top of my must-see list. Gael Garcia Bernal, playing an insecure young man who derives all of his confidence from his grandiose dreamlife, doesn't seem like an obvious choice, but then again one could say the same about Jim Carrey and Sunshine. The bonus: Charlotte Gainsbourg — Serge's enigmatically gorgeous daughter — plays Stephanie to Bernal's Stephane. How cute.

2. small town gay bar (Documentary)
While being out in the big city isn't anything to write home about anymore, being gay in the Deep South, and Mississippi specifically, still means being a member of an oppressed and often despised group. stgb focuses on the proprietors of two gay bars and the constant persecution they face as well as the important community which their establishments sustain. I'm crossing my fingers for something as frank, hearfelt, and cutting as the great transsexual doc Southern Comfort. [KEEP READING...]

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