Sundance kicks off with wide variety of docs
Films explore court battles and Internet addiction
LOS ANGELES — Last year’s Oscar winner for best documentary, Searching for Sugar Man, was first seen at the Sundance Film Festival. Ten of the 15 documentaries on the 2014 Oscar short list made their debut in the Sundance snow.
What will the 2015 documentary race look like? If Sundance’s coming batch of non-fiction films is as good an indicator as it has been in the past, the field is poised for a sharp turn toward athletics, big court battles and the evils of the Internet.
Noticeably left out are films about the environment, which were once a Sundance staple. Indeed, the topics of global warming and deforestation are absent from the coming roster (although mining and energy extraction do provide a backdrop in two films, including one of the hottest, The Overnighters, about broken men in North Dakota’s oilfields).
“Some of that is a fluke,” said David Courier, a senior Sundance programmer who helped sift through 1,718 documentary submissions for 39 slots. “But it also offers a cultural window,” he added. “What topics are our best filmmakers finding more urgent than others?”
An overdue exploration of the web’s underbelly is one such concern, Courier said. Love Child, for instance, examines a South Korean couple who became so obsessed with online games that they starved their infant daughter. The Internet’s Own Boy looks at the suicide of the Internet activist and programmer Aaron Swartz. Web Junkie investigates a Beijing rehabilitation centre for Internet addiction.
Perhaps emboldened by ESPN’s recent emphasis on documentary film, a cluster of directors will arrive with sports-themed movies at Sundance, which is scheduled for Jan. 16 to 26 in Park City, Utah.
The Battered Bastards of Baseball, from the brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, scrutinizes the meteoric rise of the minor-league Portland Mavericks in the 1970s. No No: A Dockumentary is centered on Dock Ellis, who said he pitched a no-hitter on LSD before becoming a drug counsellor. Director Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story) tries to make sense of Jerry Sandusky’s molesting of boys in Happy Valley.
Court battles have long been a cornerstone of documentary filmmaking, but Courier and another senior programmer, Caroline Libresco, noted that many highprofile new films use lawsuits as a springboard. Dinosaur 13, about the discovery of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex and the legal case that followed, will open the festival (along with another buzzy documentary, The Green Prince, about a Palestinian man who became an Israeli spy).
Another is Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, about the media circus around Smart’s 1991 trial and conviction for conspiring to murder her husband.
Despite the occasional runaway hit — Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth — non-fiction films still occupy a box-office backwater. Sundance sees it as part of its job to change that; for years, the festival has treated documentaries as equals to narrative features, carv- ing out a niche for itself while also helping dozens of non-fiction filmmakers find distributors.
At the most recent festival, all 16 of the documentaries in Sundance’s U.S. competition found distributors. (One film from this batch, Citizen Koch, about the billionaire industrialists Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, gained particular notice when PBS reversed its decision to broadcast it; its directors have since raised money on Kickstarter and plan a spring release.)
Sundance’s documentary categories have recently grown in visibility because of the rise of new buyers. Netflix, for instance, has become a Sundance shopper and has already acquired Mitt, an inside look at Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that will have its première at the coming festival. CNN has also emerged as a major documentary force, picking up Blackfish, a harsh look at orcas at Sea World, the last time around; it will return this month with offerings like a documentary about film critic Roger Ebert.
Another extremely active new buyer is Radius-TWC, a division of the Weinstein Co. that focuses on video-on-demand services. Among Radius’s many purchases in 2012 was 20 Feet from Stardom, a look at backup singers that took in about $4.8 million at the box office and millions more through on-demand viewing.
John Cooper, Sundance’s director, acknowledged that new distributors have added electricity to the nonfiction sections of his festival. But he said credit should also go to the filmmakers: people like Stephanie Soechtig, who directed Fed Up, a look at childhood obesity that makes a sweeping topic manageable.
“We are really struck by how documentaries as a whole are becoming more theatrical — better narrative, the use of animation, even better credit sequences,” Cooper said. “Being a great non-fiction storyteller is no longer enough. You also have to be a great moviemaker.”