Sundance Snowballs Into a Big, Cozy Fest : Film: In its 14th year, Utah’s movie marketplace has become a mecca for independent filmmakers hoping for the success of ‘sex, lies, and videotape.’

This pleasant ex-mining town turned resort is known to some as the headquarters of the U.S. Ski Team, the home of locally celebrated Wasatch brews, even the place where George Hearst, William Randolph’s old man, made all his millions. But to anyone with an interest in film, Park City means one thing and one thing only: the increasingly celebrated Sundance Film Festival.

Now in its 14th season, Sundance and the town have both changed over the years. The state’s beverage consumption laws, for instance, which once attained an almost Talmudic complexity, allow the local Chamber of Commerce to boast that “Utah’s newly revised liquor laws are almost normal now.” And while Sundance used to be a quiet little festival, it is now anything but.

For after such films as “sex, lies, and videotape,” “House Party” and “River’s Edge” made their first flashes up here, Sundance has become the mothership for the American independent film movement. As starlets used to go to Cannes to be discovered, non-Hollywood movies come here hoping to catch the eye of the film Establishment.

And, naturally flattered, the film Establishment makes the yearly trek to Utah in greater and greater numbers. Agents, publicists and development executives prowl the occasionally snowy streets on a lonely search for new talent. The media also comes in increasing numbers--this year’s contingent included everyone from the Utne Reader and Le Monde to MTV and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”--and even other film festivals hawk their wares. Come to Mannheim, a glossy brochure pleads, “The festival where ‘business does not come first.’ ”

Yet Sundance still is one of the cozier of film festivals, with a number of homey touches. The audiences get to vote on their favorite films, mug-shot type Polaroids of the filmmakers are tacked to the hospitality suite wall so everyone can find who they are looking for, and the preponderance of parkas, sweaters and cowboy boots gives the place a casual, countercultural feel.

“This is the opposite of Hollywood, where they try and make the pictures fit the audience,” says filmmaker Kit Carson, a Park City veteran. “These films, especially this year, are from the gut.”

Though the festival hosts screenings at the Sundance Institute itself and opened last Thursday in Salt Lake City with the premiere of Nora and Delia Ephron’s enormously charming and surprisingly moving “This Is My Life,” the emphasis is on Park City’s parallel competitions, the dramatic and the documentary, and the thirtysomething films that are entered in both. The competition brings out the film critic in everyone--”In the ‘60s I would have been impressed but not now” was a typical after-screening comment--and though such diverse films as the very violent “Reservoir Dogs” and the softer “Zebrahead” are attracting a lot of notice, in one of those odd film festival coincidences perhaps the two strongest films here both feature protagonists in wheelchairs.

“The Waterdance,” co-directed by Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg from Jimenez’s original script, tells a largely autobiographical story of a writer who must adjust to being paralyzed from the waist down. Blessed with a splendid cast, including Eric Stoltz, Wesley Snipes and William Forsythe, “The Waterdance” is kind of a miracle, an entertaining, provocative, genuinely funny film on a potentially troublesome subject that never preaches, never sentimentalizes, yet is always near the heart.

“A Brief History of Time,” the latest nonpareil documentary from “A Thin Blue Line’s” Errol Morris, intertwines tantalizing theories about the origin of the universe with the life of physicist Stephen Hawking, who began to do his best work only when faced with the onset of a crippling disease.

In addition to the films in competition, Sundance features a daunting array of special programs, including tributes to past masters Stanley Kubrick and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as a variety of premieres and special events. Festival-goers were mixed about the world premiere of “Storyville,” the directorial debut of “Twin Peaks’ ” Mark Frost, but the U.S. premiere of the British “Edward II,” a very modern updating of a Christopher Marlowe play, was being called director Derek Jarman’s “best film yet.”

Since they are rarely screened elsewhere, the chance to see documentaries is one of Park City’s most satisfying joys. Whether they are full length, like Marco Williams’ movingly autobiographical “In Search of our Fathers,” or tantalizingly short like “Stealing Altitude,” a literally breathtaking look at men who jump from tall buildings, by USC film school grads Roger Teich and John Starr, these documentaries alone make the trek to ski country worthwhile.