Sundance Fest Retains Its Counterculture Essence : Movies: Despite the inevitable Hollywood overlay, a youthful enthusiasm for film still characterizes the annual event.

Yes, the Sundance Film Festival is more crowded than it’s ever been. Yes, the Barking Frog, the town’s restaurant of choice, was fully booked before a single film was shown and agents with cigars can be seen walking down Main Street and talking on cellular phones at the backs of theaters. But somehow the essence of this event still gets through. Witness Megwynn White.

“It’s really, really cool here--I don’t know how else to say it,” says White, one of a group of 24 exuberant students from a filmmaking program at Pacoima Junior High who have come en masse as the festival’s partial guests to experience its wonders. “We’ve been at other festivals, but since we’re kids, we don’t always get a really good response. But here we can go up to directors, say, ‘Hi, we’re students,’ and actually talk to them.”

This is the second year a group from Pacoima has come to the festival, and though Sundance supplies them with free tickets, the students spend the entire year, in vintage Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney fashion, raising money to pay their expenses.

“We sold hundreds of boxes of chocolates, blow pops, gummy bears, gummy worms, everything there is that’s gummy,” says Josh Gray-Emmer, who has moved on to Van Nuys High School. “If you counted each of the M&Ms; we sold, it was in the millions. And we all had to keep a B average to be able to attend.”

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Is it worth it? “It’s incredible,” says Gray-Emmer, 15, whose ambition is to be the youngest producer in the motion picture academy. “A lot of students don’t go to anything but what’s in the big theaters, and that’s so limited. You’d be amazed at how different our films were after last year’s festival. This gives us a chance to see what else is out there. We didn’t even know films like this could exist.”

And, despite the inevitable Hollywood overlay, it is this kind of youthful enthusiasm for film and its ability to say something meaningful, to form an emotional connection with its audience, that still characterizes the Sundance festival. With posters taped to walls and a hand-lettered message near a hectic box office reading, “Avert misunderstanding by calm, poise, balance,” the festival maintains a shaggy, counterculture feeling. Where else would “Darkness in Tallinn,” an out-of-competition thriller shot in the Baltics, try to get everyone’s attention with mimeographed flyers reading, “Everybody must get Estoned.”

Curiously paralleling their audience, many of the films in competition this year are earnest and sincere, more notable for the decency of their intentions than the dazzling nature of their execution. Judging by the first few days, dysfunctional families are a popular theme, with “Spanking the Monkey” confronting incest and “Fun” examining a thrill killing by teen-age girls who didn’t exactly have caring parents.

Also in this mode is the touching and sentimental “blessing,” the story of a free-spirited Wisconsin farm girl who dreams of better things but must deal with an abusive father, not to mention all those cows. Actress Melora Griffis gives a nicely unaffected performance and gets to play a lot of emotional scenes against her real-life father, actor Guy Griffis.

One of the audience favorites among dramatic films, “Fresh,” written and directed by Boaz Yakin, also has a splintered family at its core. Twelve-year-old Michael, street name Fresh, is a wise-beyond-his-years Brooklyn kid who works for a pair of local drug dealers and, yes, dreams of better things. An unlikely and often unwieldy amalgam of social consciousness and commercial thriller elements, “Fresh” does feature solid performances from Samuel L. Jackson as Fresh’s chess-addicted father, Giancarlo Esposito as the boy’s drug-dealing mentor, “Zebrahead’s” N’Bushe Wright as his troubled sister, and Sean Nelson as Fresh himself.

One of the most popular documentaries so far also has a family theme. “Martha and Ethel” is an extremely personal look at the lifelong nannies who raised the large families of each of the filmmakers. Martha, who emigrated from Germany, is the disciplinarian who took care of all six Ettingers, including co-producer Barbara, while Ethel is an affectionate black woman from South Carolina who reared five Johnston children, including director-co-producer Jyll. The film has become something of a Cinderella story, getting a distribution deal with Sony Classics after just one screening.

With the highly anticipated “Hoop Dreams,” a nearly three-hour documentary on four years in the lives of Chicago-area basketball players still to come, the most thoughtful and informative doc at the festival so far is “Freedom on My Mind,” co-directed and co-produced by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford.

An examination of the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in rural Mississippi in the early 1960s, this spirited look at a spirited time evokes a struggle whose enormity we have largely forgotten.

Extremely politically incorrect but often quite funny is “Clerks,” a black-and-white dramatic look at a really bad day in the lives of two members of the dazed and confused generation, New Jersey division. Dante clerks at Quick Stop Groceries in Asbury Park, an establishment that makes a 7-Eleven look upscale, while buddy Randel works at a nearby video store so feeble he himself rents elsewhere.

Ragged, anarchic and clearly too long, this gleefully raunchy series of sketches is a kind of Eric Bogosian meets “Slackers.” Writer-director Kevin Smith doesn’t handle his female characters very well, but his ear for the obscene banter of guys hanging out is impeccable. Equal parts funny and offensive, “Clerks” has the kind of cinematic energy that shows Sundance at its best.