There’s Lots Here to Like

One year ago, the creators of “The Blair Witch Project” were a scruffy trio with an unknown film slated for a chilly midnight screening. Today, they are the carefully groomed centerpiece of a high-gloss ad for Dewar’s scotch that is prominently featured in the festival’s fat and happy program. Such is the power of Sundance.

It’s all too easy to take pot shots at this festival, to bemoan its omnipresent “Budweiser Welcomes the Sundance Film Festival” commercialism and a cell phone usage that’s up 550% over the town’s normal. And it’s even easier to be taken aback by the ever-increasing crowds. People stood on the waiting list line for the world premiere of “American Psycho” last Friday for four hours without getting in (they can count themselves lucky), and other ticketless individuals have shown up with sleeping bags at the festival’s box office as early as 3:50 a.m. to wait for released tickets. The hunger for film is that strong.

But this year, which has opened with a surprisingly satisfying and entertaining group of films both in and out of competition, it’s easier to concentrate on the festival’s good side. Like its air of convivial, youthful vitality, which British playwright David Hare, here for the world premiere of his insightful and remarkably compelling monologue on Israel, “Via Dolorosa,” noticed at once.

“There’s the implicit claim that any young person feels they are able to make a film; they just want to work in the form, it’s an attractive way of life,” he says, smiling. “If you are thinking about lifestyle, Sundance is a wonderful place to come to, with a lot of hip young people. It seems a very big dating festival, teeming with sexual spores.”

Sundance is also the place where the most unusual juxtapositions are business as usual. Arthur Nakane, a Los Angeles-based one-man band and the subject of a short called “Secret Asian Man,” showed up with all his instruments and had people literally go-go dancing in the aisles of the tiny Holiday Village cinema after an unscheduled live performance.

Immediately following this was a packed screening of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a documentary about the woman who was once the first lady of religious broadcasting. (It’s being promoted with several hundred giveaway copies of “The Tammy Faye Survival Kit,” which includes “Purr Lipgloss, Chicory Pencil, Pink Glow Blush, White Frost Eye Shadow and Black Cream Eyeliner.”)

The film itself, a crowd-pleasing combination of campy sensibility and serious reporting, shows the former Tammy Faye Bakker to be a more intriguing individual than might be suspected. Introduced by RuPaul, the film’s narrator, after the screening, the diminutive interdenominational minister, resplendent in a bright red outfit topped by a white fur hat, lived up to expectations.

“I was scared to look at it at first,” she says of the film she is now partial to. “I sobbed all the way through it, got sick, cried for days.” Asked why God had placed so many obstacles in her path, she can’t resisting cracking, “he hates me.”

As far removed from Tammy Faye as you can imagine was “Simon Magus,” an artfully constructed and haunting fable about Jews in the Diaspora that’s an exceptionally promising debut for British writer-director Ben Hopkins. Set in a 19th century Central European Jewish community and called “a Yiddish biblical western” by its director, “Simon Magus” manages to be magical in both the beautiful and terrifying senses of the word.

Sundance has traditionally been the place where young directors get discovered, and the discovery of the first part of the festival has been writer-director Karyn Kusama, whose “Girlfight,” a potent romantic melodrama with feminist underpinnings, was reportedly the subject of bidding from four companies after its tumultuous first screening.

A boxer herself, the 30-year-old Kusama said she began to wonder what would happen when young women from the same disadvantaged socioeconomic background that produces male professional fighters decide they want to get into the ring. What resulted is the story of Diana, an 18-year-old tower of hostility from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn whose seething anger both terrifies and fascinates everyone she meets.

A former assistant to independent pioneers John Sayles and Maggie Rienzi (who beamed from the back of the theater like the proudest of parents), Kusama was looking for “that kind of raw quality” in casting Diana. When Michelle Rodriguez, who gives an intense, driven performance, showed up at an open call, the director liked her but didn’t say yes right away, noting, “She had no training in any way, and casting her was too frightening to imagine.”

Kusama took the plunge and now feels “I kind of lucked out. I told my casting director I needed Brando as a teenage girl, and I found her.”

If Kusama is a beginner, Barbara Kopple is one of the most respected documentary directors of her generation, with Academy Awards for “Harlan County” and “American Dream.” Yet she too is in Sundance with a marvelous, just-about-completed work in progress on all three Woodstock music festivals called “My Generation.”

Filled with music and vivid on-the-scene reportage, “My Generation” is a thought-provoking and surprising answer to the expected question of what was different and what was the same about the kids who came out to have fun in 1969, 1994 and 1999. It is also a potent case history of how difficult it can be to get even the most promising documentaries made and how artistically rich the payoff can be for perseverance.

Kopple was brought on to film the 1994 event, hence the striking behind-the-scenes footage detailing how things like sponsorship deals were worked out. (There was even an official Woodstock ’94 condom, which is why “My Generation” condoms were being handed out here as promotional items.)

A few months later, Polygram, which was sponsoring the festival, “got cold feet about the concert and tried to stop the filming,” Kopple reports. “They thought by taking away the money, of course, I would stop. But I wouldn’t let a small thing like money get in my way. Everyone, my family, my friends, said, ‘Now you’ve gone overboard,’ but I was so into it, I just kept doing it myself.”

Kopple ended up putting up her own money and time for six years. When she was in the finishing stages of editing the film, the 1999 festival was announced, and Kopple, still without a funding source, “leapt on it. I said, ‘We’re going.’ It was like a gift.”

Now, with footage of the burning of concession stands that was the most visible part of the 1999 event included, “My Generation” caught a break. Polygram was sold to Universal and the film has been completely freed up for distribution, which Kopple hopes to get out of its Sundance screening.

“Woodstock has been a pivotal experience for three generations,” she says. “It’s the culmination of so much that has gone on in the 1900s, and I wanted to show who these generations are.”