The Films Attract the Sideshows

They show films at the Sundance Festival, don’t they?

A bit of a perverse question, perhaps. After all, the clamor to compete in the 2000 event, which starts this week in Park City, Utah, has been more intense than ever, with a record just shy of 1,200 films being submitted for Sundance’s coveted 32 (16 dramatic, 16 documentary) competitive slots.

And Sundance, which officially opens Thursday night in Salt Lake City with “What’s Cooking?” from Britain’s Gurinder Chadha (“Bhaji on the Beach”), continues to be a powerful magnet for everything from foreign filmmakers to Altoids curiously strong mints.

Two of the most remote parts of Asia, Bhutan and Tadjikistan, will be sending directors Khyentse Norbu and Bakhitiar Khudojnazarov with their films, “The Cup” and “Luna Papa,” respectively. They are the first features from their countries ever to be submitted for Oscar consideration. And the Altoids people, one of the many commercial companies that smile on Park City product placement, promise to ship approximately 5 million giveaway mints, “enough to erect its own ski mountain” should the need arise.

Aside from mints, Sundance attracts what often feels like millions of people but usually isn’t. Crowd totals for the 10-day event are in the 13,000 range, but this year, with all manner of digital and dot-com ventures like IFILM.com added to the mix, the totals are expected to swell. This predicted techno-influx has led to apocalyptical worries about a cell-phone gridlock so intense no one will be able to call L.A.

Restaurant gridlock already has set in, with reservations filling up a month before the festival started and one establishment demanding a $60 food minimum per person as the price of a table. As to more conventional gridlock, students at Park City High School have come up with a money-raising scheme to carpool to school and sell their parking passes to the Eccles Theater lot for $200 a pop. Hey, it’s for a good cause (the school’s fine arts department).

What all of this Sturm und Drang means is that it’s difficult to think of Sundance as simply a place where films are shown. It’s become, partly by happenstance, partly by design, a kind of multicultural circus, a self-fulfilling prophecy more than a festival, a place people attempt, like Everest, just because it’s there.

In an attempt to cater to everyone who shows up, or maybe because it wants to attract a diverse crowd, Sundance has been expanding itself into nonfilm areas. The Sundance Music Studio, sponsored by BMG Music and the Sundance Channel, will once again offer live musical performances, and a pair of high-powered theatrical events, Charlayne Woodard’s “In Real Life” and Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” will be put on.

Even in the film area, Sundance, like Cannes, has long been several festivals. Slamdance, the first Sundance alternative, around long enough to seem positively venerable, celebrates its longevity by opening a second venue, the Filmmakers’ Lounge, to deal with the deserving overflow from the record 2,050 submissions it received.

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Somewhere under all this hubbub, buried, perhaps, under that mountain of Altoids, are the actual Sundance films, the reason it all began. As has become usual for the last few years, the most anticipated films are in the Premieres section, where bigger name pictures end up.

Because his “Big Night” was a highlight of Sundance a few years back, Stanley Tucci’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” is one of the festival’s most-anticipated films. Set in 1940s New York, it’s the based-on-fact story of the unexpected relationship between New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (Tucci) and a formidably eccentric, Harvard-educated street person named Joe Gould (Ian Holm).

Sundance’s Centerpiece Premiere is Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Love and Basketball,” which touches on two preoccupations of its producer, Spike Lee. Also worth noting are through-a-glass-darkly items like Mary Harron’s “American Psycho” (rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Assn. of America for, typically, sex rather than violence); Michael Almereyda’s Ethan Hawke-starring “Hamlet”; and “Rated X,” brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen’s take on the Mitchell brothers, San Francisco’s pornography pioneers.

Sure to be lighter is “Happy Accidents,” Brad Anderson’s follow-up to his under-appreciated “Next Stop, Wonderland.” Also worth a look is “Waking the Dead,” a haunted “Endless Love” type romance (in fact based on a Scott Spenser novel) in which Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly are quietly convincing as a couple whose love may or may not be divided by death.

While the lucky 16 films allowed in the dramatic competition are usually by complete unknowns, some familiar names have made it into the fray this year. Most eagerly awaited is the Heather Graham-starring “Committed,” written and director by Lisa Krueger, whose “Manny and Lo” was the delight of an earlier Sundance.

Other competition directors with track records include “Drop Back Ten’s” Stacy Cochran (“My New Gun”), “Chuck and Buck’s” Miguel Arteta (“Star Maps”) and the Janet McTeer-starring “SongCatcher’s” Maggie Greenwald (“The Ballad of Little Jo”).

While the dramatic competition captures much of the publicity, Sundance regulars know that World Cinema, where 450 films competed for 29 slots this year, is where some of the best films are to be found. Aside from Bhutan’s “The Cup,” which is a favorite at Cannes and about to be released, other films of interest are Cuban director Gerardo Chijona’s “Paradise Under the Stars,” a tribute to Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub, and “Herod’s Law,” a satire on the ruling PRI party that has been a phenomenal success in its native Mexico.

One of the festival’s most satisfying films is in one of its more obscure categories, a catchall division called Special Screenings. That’s the home of “Via Dolorosa,” a filmed version of the compelling monologue on the state of Israel that playwright David Hare wrote and performed to great success as a one-man show in London and New York. Melding sharp insight with a magician’s flair for language (and a gift for making ideas dramatic), Hare vividly describes and analyzes this contradictory country where, a friend says, “in a single day I experience events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.”

The documentary competition at Sundance is where the quality is consistently the highest. Of the dozen features just named as finalists for best documentary Oscar, six debuted at last year’s Sundance (and a seventh, Todd Robinson’s “Amargosa,” will be screening at this year’s Slamdance).

Three hundred and forty-seven documentaries applied for this year’s 16 slots, a 57% rise from 1999, so the quality is higher than ever. Sundance regulars Susan Todd and Andrew Young have a new film in competition (“Americanos: Latin Life in the United States”), as do Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“Paragraph 175,” about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals). Out of competition, two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple offers a work-in-progress look at her “My Generation,” an examination of all three Woodstock music festivals.

Those looking for the kind of intensely human dramas that the best of Sundance documentaries often provide will have at least three excellent docs to choose from, all of which delve into highly emotional areas that most people know little about.

* “Sound and Fury,” directed by Josh Aronson, says, with little exaggeration, that it’s about “the communication wars of the deaf.” A relatively new medical procedure called a cochlear implant that makes it possible for deaf children to hear has caused profound divisions in the deaf community as parents agonize over what is due their children and what is due to deaf culture, deaf identity and deaf pride. Intimately focused as well as fair to all sides, this is a powerful examination of a question that is nowhere as simple as it may seem at first.

* The subject of “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is better known, but to view its mandate of trading truth for amnesty with the intensity this Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann-directed film achieves is also a revelation. Using four case histories, including the much-publicized one of murdered American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl, it wrenchingly exposes the dehumanization that apartheid caused.

And “Journey Into Day” also illustrates both the human need for forgiveness and how difficult, almost impossible, that can be to achieve.

* Standing out for being groundbreaking, as well as devastating, is Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini’s “Well-Founded Fear,” an unprecedented look at how the Immigration and Naturalization Service decides whom it will grant political asylum. What “Well-Founded Fear” shows, aside from the often horrific stories the asylum-seekers tell, is how arbitrary the asylum process is, and how human and fallible the asylum officers who make the critical decisions can be. Some officers seem too gullible, some too suspicious, and almost all are victimized, as are the applicants, by inept translators who leave out critical information with terrifying frequency. If it’s life-and-death drama you’re looking for, with entire futures hinging on a few words, this is the place to go.