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Slamdance Film Festival

January 20 - 27, 2001 (Park City, Utah)

"Digital Schmigital"
was the title of Dan Mirvish's (Slamdance co-founder's) opening night poem.
It speaks for itself. Slamdance, however, will present a wide spectrum of digital
works during its week of exhibitions, including today's Daydream Believer,
which was shot on an ultra low budget by New York filmmaker Debra Eisenstadt.




Eisenstadt wrote, directed, shot and edited her 79 minute DV feature, which
she created over the course of a year on a VX-1000 camera in New York City and
Vermont. It tells the story of Valerie Woodbury, a Vermont actress who follows
her dreams to New York City, where - surprise - things don't work out in quite
the way she hoped. Despite the familiarity of the story, the appealing performance
of the lead, Sibyl Kempson, and the excellent score by Jenifer Jackson, help
this story stand out from the pack of shoestring DV projects. Time will tell
whether the do-it-yourself digital aesthetic will translate to worthwhile distribution
deals forged at this festival.



The preceding feature, Aril Margolis and Jim Morley's Black Days, was
better attended but not necessarily better received. "I think we set the record
for walk-outs", commented Morley in the post-screening Q&A. Some viewers may
have been turned off by the movie's extremely stylized self-referential approach,
but it was clear that far more festival-goers were won over by it. Black
Days tells the story of Ty, a hapless parking lot attendant who has the
bad luck to encounter Gwen, a classic femme fatale with the unpleasant habit
of slicing the thumbs off her ex-boyfriends. The film is ever so self-consciously
a comment on film noir conventions, with plenty of canted angles, seedy motel
signs, and iconic glowing cigarettes. The filmmakers take this approach a few
clicks too far at times - for example, there are several long sequences of nothing
but a black screen, with voice-overs. This gets old.



However, the film made an impression on its world premiere audience with its
distinctive voice. The script is unusual in that it contains nothing but snappy
noir dialogue, blood and asphalt drenched LA night mysonginistic violence scenarios,
and hi-contrast Black and White images. complete with lazy ceiling fans, cigarette
smoke, and rays of sunlight filtered through Venetian blinds. Morley made his
whole crew sit down and watch Double Indemnity, several times.



Indeed, DP Chris Scarafile's black and white photography was the film's strongest
element. Margolis and Morley shot their debut feature in 19 days on less than
$40,000, which should be inspirational to filmmakers everywhere.



A new element this year of the Sundance/Slamdance experiences was that the Park
City police have begun to arrest filmmakers for committing the time-honored
practice of 'flyering' on Main Street, which consists of handing promotional
material to every single passer-by on the theory that one of them might be in
a position to buy a movie.



"I was talking to a friend about my film," reports South Dakota filmmaker John
Hansen (who drove here from Sioux Falls). "Another guy asked me for a flyer.
I handed it to him and he handed me a yellow ticket stating that I had violated
a Park City ordinance. It was basically entrapment," said Hanson. His film,
Faust, tells the enitre Faust story in 17 minutes, and it was made on
an hand-cranked Eymo 35 mm camera. "No one around me knew anything about filmmaking,"
said Hansen, "so I had to learn everything myself."



The evening's best entertainment may have been the short subjects preceding
the features. Recent NYU graduate Joram Schwartz's The Amish Friendship Bread
Conspiracy (4 mins.) was a comic delight, exploring the possibilities of
friendship dough gone awry. The film's technique was a delightful combination
of claymation and still photography cut-outs.



Window, by Victoria Livingstone, was just another unfinished student
film until her new employers, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, agreed
to provide finishing resources. The resulting B&W claymation short (10 mins.)
presents a Kafaeque vision of a near-escape from a drab, dehumanized future
world.



Chi Yen Ooi is an Australian film student of Chinese descent. His short (18
mins.) Days of Being, was the day's most popular short, despite being
filmed in Chinese with subtitles. It proposes that memory works forward in time
as well as backward, and it contrasts the story of a young modern Chinese woman
sold into sexual slavery in Melbourne with a long-ago tale of a young Chinese
woman discovered in a forbidden affair with a monk. The superb acting, art direction,
and the poignancy of the story made it stand out.



Overall, audience attendance seemed a bit lower than expected. During the next
few days, we will attempt to gauge the success of Slamdance's move to the Silvermine
in terms of screening attendance, which is arguably the most vital indicator.

George
Wing

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