Sundance: The Importance of Shorts

Last Thursday, fresh off my flight, I snagged a hot ticket to see the premiere of Shorts Program 1, on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. The line-up featured four films: “I’m Here” by Spike Jonze; “The Fence” by Rory Kennedy; “Logorama” by Francoise Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, Ludovic Houplain (H5); and “Seeds of the Fall” by Patrik Eklund.

The Egyptian Theatre, with its Art Deco vibe, and old-fashioned seats, is a reminder of what the typical movie experience used to be. The crowd was chatty, and as I sat there, waiting for the premiere to begin (most screenings at Sundance, I learned, don’t start on time, but you still have to get there early), I could hear industry insiders catching up with one another. (The woman behind mentioned her lunch with Michael Moore three times: “He said some really interesting things, things I can’t repeat here.”) Either way, everyone seemed quite pleased that their screening was special enough for Robert Redford to take the stage before its start. He’s quite charming in that all-American way, with his cowboy boots, tousled hair and perfect posture. Here’s what he said to us:

I want to say, this is an opening tonight, the Shorts Program. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that. And there are a lot of things we’re doing differently this year. One of the things we wanted to do, tying to the diversity of Sundance and the fact that we have different types of films–rather than putting all the eggs in one basket—’OK, we’re going to have a grand opening at the Eccles Theatre’–we’re going to have multiple openings featuring the different parts of Sundance that we hold with equal importance. And Shorts is that: equally important. So we’re really happy to have this screening tonight as an opening. I just wanted you to know that.

On the idea of shorts: Over the years Sundance has been committed to forging new ground in film. We started with documentaries in the late eighties on the assumption that documentaries would and should reach the level of narrative films, and find a marketplace.

When we select, we ask people to send tapes and they usually send shorts. So we look at these shorts to evaluate the filmmakers and see if they can come to Sundance. Well, looking at those shorts–it’s very, very impacting, because they are all stories–and it occurred to me a long time ago that this category should be encased and put into a kind of program. That someday there would be a future in the marketplace for them. So we were doing a lot of that for a lot of years and now with the advance in the new technologies and the shortening attention span, now there is a distribution marketplace for shorts. And I think the shorts programs are going to play a greater and greater role.

I think it’s interesting that Redford said this (the bold is mine), in part because YouTube was a big sponsor for the festival this year, but also because I think he’s right. The Internet may have caused a lot of trouble for the movie industry, but I think it is also the perfect home for short films.

I caught a bit of Robert Redford on my Flip camera, too:

Robert Redford at Sundance from Thessaly La Force on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 2:21 PM and is filed under Uncategorized, events, film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.