This year is my year, and a great way to start this year off is to go to Park City, Utah to attend the Sundance Film Festival for my first time ever. I've been planning this since last summer, submitted a film (that unfortunately didn't get accepted) but nonetheless, came out to experience one of the most highly acclaimed film festivals around the world.
I left Tuesday, January 25th at around 3pm, met Michelle at our layover in Vegas and continued on the same flight, sitting right next to each other heading to Salt Lake City. My aunt Heather lives in Salt Lake City and was kind enough to pick us up from the airport and let us stay at her house for that night until we officially check into our hotel in Park City, Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday morning we're out on the road heading to Park City from Salt Lake City. First stop, ticket packages to get our tickets and credentials. Second stop, breakfast, free might I add! :) After that we took a quick stroll up and down Main Street which is the "main" street that the festival is off of and a man with a camera sees me taking pictures with my camera and asks us if we'd like to do an interview. I hesitated, but we did one nonetheless. Turns out he was getting some footage of the festival for the local news in the area. After that we finally got to our hotel, it was about noon and I was so damn happy to finally check in. We dropped off all our stuff and headed back out to plan the rest of our day.
When you buy a festival package in October, they give you dates in December when you can use those ticket vouchers that they give you to pick out which specific films you want to watch on which days you'll be there. Well, around that time I was working on a feature film and I must've missed the email that stated our allotted time to pick these films so when we got our ticket package this morning, we got 20 vouchers, with no assurance that we'd get into any of the films. So we head to the box office to see what we can scrounge up. Lots of the films we wanted to see ended up being sold out, so we were pretty bummed but tried to see what was left. We ended up turning in 8 vouchers total for 4 movies throughout the week. If a film is sold out then you can waitlist to see if maybe you can get in a couple hours prior to screening, but it's a crapshoot. So after, we walk around, get lunch, check out some stores, the filmmakers lounge, the Sundance store and a few other things around our area. Everything is in very close proximity so we've been walking everywhere with no need for a car or public transportation. Thank goodness we booked a hotel that's close! :)
So I get a text from my Aunt Heather that she saw us on the news that night. Score! Haha, didn't think it was really gonna get put on so I'm gonna check it out online to see if I can find that segment. Pretty funny though.
So during lunch Michelle and I decided that we wanted to try and crash a film tonight along with the tickets we got to the first shorts program at 11:30pm. The film we wanted to crash was at 8:15pm. We dropped stuff off at the hotel and came to get on the waitlist! We got a number, came back and we waited to see if they'd let us in and we got in!
The film we saw was called Higher Ground directed by Vera Farmiga and she also stars in it. She's in The Departed, Up in the Air and others. The film had a strong religious tone to it, which isn't my usual cup of tea, but I was very open minded to the film but unfortunately it was quite long or so it seemed and it lost me towards the second half. It started to drag a bit too much, no big conflict and in total just a regular story line, nothing spectacular. Michelle liked it because she said it shows the real life problems that everyday normal, religious people go through questioning their faith and themselves. I agree and it did take me into a realm that I've never been into. You get to see the lives of truly religious people that I've never experienced to that degree and the film did that well, but other than that, didn't really care for it nor have any attachments to it.
The second screening we saw was the first shorts program. Now of course I really wanted to see this because I'm interested in the short films that are "supposedly" better than mine because they got in and mine didn't. Well...they showed about 5 or 6 shorts and to put it in lamens terms, the shorts fucking sucked. Sorry, but they did. I've never been SO dissapointed and let down. I'm officially embarrassed for Sundance's selection of panels that chose these films because they did a horrible job. Not to say that my film was absolutely amazing, but dear lord these were absolutely dreadful. There was actually only one that Michelle and I actually liked and the others I was literally about to walk out of the theatre. They were worthless, no good, shitty shorts that involved either raping a dead woman, masturbation or two men, one dressed in drag, having a baby that is a doll. I mean come ON! Of ALLLLL the thousands of submissions, this is the best Sundance can come up with?
And on top of all of that, one of the shorts was an all star cast, literally. It had Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Elijah Wood, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and the list seriously goes on. One of the producers was Capitol Records and it was made on location at Warner Bros. Studios. Now let me get this straight...Robert Redford first founded this festival to be a strong point for indie filmmakers and to discover unknown talents and artist? Why the FUCK was a stupid ass short made by Will Ferrell and the gang accepted over an indie artist who probably worked their ass off for their short, scrounging up all the money they could find from their family and friends, just so they could get rejected for a short with an all star cast that was probably just some dumb fun project they did one Saturday afternoon because, oh I don't know, they have tons of money to throw away!?! Absolutely ridiculous. Unbelievable.
As a filmmaker this makes me so disappointed and almost defeated because I have to basically now come up with a short that has some outrageous undertone to it with absolutely no attention to story, concept or acting??? Hell no. That's not why I'm a filmmaker and if this is what Sundance is about, then they can kiss my ass.
My standards were set quite high when I attended my first film festival in the south of France at Cannes and let me tell you, Sundance has thus far fallen QUITE short to those standards. I am in utter disbelief...so with that being said, the shorts are done with and the remainder of the films I will be attending will be the features. Let's hope those are better...I'm going to keep a positive outlook.
I'm signing off for today. I will be posting daily during the festival. Hopefully it gets better from here! :)
-Director Pamela Matew
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