Canadian Sundance efforts highlight truths
Sliding into the briny basin of Great Salt Lake like an annual avalanche of glacial liberalism, this year’s Sundance Film Festival will once again offer movies about sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But alongside Amanda Seyfried’s turn as porn star Linda Lovelace and James Franco’s experimental ode to leather bars, the Park City wingding that kicked off Thursday will also feature a few Canadian efforts that highlight different human truths.
Headlined by Canada’s sweetheart Sarah Polley, who travels to Utah with her poignant family portrait Stories We Tell, this year’s Canadian contingent also includes the feature debut from former Vancouverite Jason DaSilva, a filmmaker who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and documents his journey in When I Walk, as well as an avant-garde look at life in prison from Montrealborn filmmaker François Delisle titled The Meteor.
Also on the Canuck bus: The Near Future, a short film from Sophie Goyette, and S-VHS 2, a U.S.-Canada coproduction that marks the Sundance return of Jason Eisener, the Nova Scotia dir- ector of Hobo With a Shotgun.
In addition to Franco and Seyfried, this week’s Park City hot-tub sightings could include Nicole Kidman, who stars with Mia Wasikowska in Stoker, a new movie from Old Boy director Park Chanwook.
Throw in Foo Fighter and former Nirvana member Dave Grohl with his debut cannonball Sound City, a documentary about his effort to keep live music in the production studio — not to mention the self-explanatory 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, as well as The Square (Al Midan), which looks at the Arab Spring — and the creative Jacuzzi tilts to the left with a decided slosh.
It’s no wonder the festival consistently dampens the more conservative spirits in the Beehive State, as it has again this year. This month, the Salt Lake City-based Sutherland Institute issued a statement demanding the state stop supporting the festival and its “indecent” programming that brings “sexual promiscuity to Utah.”
While it’s the first time any group has gone after the state’s funding of the festival specifically, the Sutherland Institute’s recent salvo echoes similar attacks in the past, including that of the Westboro Baptist Church’s protest of Kevin Smith’s Red State and its depiction of Christian fundamentalism in 2011.
Year after year, one group or another takes umbrage at the film festival’s existence for pursuing its very entire raison d’être: exploring the world around us through a creative lens, regardless of the inconvenient truths it may expose.