Sundance: A Midwinter Night's Dream

Set in deep winter in way-upstate New York, first-time writer-director Courtney Hunt's Frozen River provides a welcome throwback to the truly independent films on whose backs Sundance was built — movies by filmmakers like Victor Nunez, Eagle Pennell and Glen Pitre that offered lyrical glimpses of regional American life in parts of the country rarely visited by the dominant Hollywood cinema. Hunt's film follows the desperate measures taken by a newly single mother of two to keep her family afloat in the days leading up to Christmas, and its mood is one of lived-in decrepitude and working-class gristle — a perfect fit for the hardscrabble character actress Melissa Leo (21 Grams), who shines brightly in her first major leading role.

Even more striking is Ballast, a debut feature not only for writer-director Lance Hammer but for much of its crew and for all of its principal cast — remarkable nonprofessional actors recruited on location in Canton, Mississippi (where the photographer William Eggleston once made his own little-seen foray into feature filmmaking, Stranded in Canton). Like Frozen River, it is a story of mother and son trying to make ends meet, though where Hunt's film is decidedly straightforward and matter-of-fact, Hammer's is fragmentary, mysterious and poetic, revealing its central characters and relationships gradually and from a distance, as if we were entering into a private dream.

Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Ballast

Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Transsiberian

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• Sundance Film Festival
• Lance Hammer
• Barry Levinson
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Ballast (which was also just announced for a competition slot at this year's Berlin Film Festival) is a movie marked by the most unusual mix of inspirations — Charles Burnett's impressionistic renderings of black American life, the Dardenne brothers' neo-realist city symphonies, and Mexican director Carlos Reygadas' ecstatic wide-screen exploration of rural vistas. But Hammer — who holds an architecture degree and got started in movies as an art director — has digested those influences and formed from them a wholly original meditation on lost souls trying to gain a foothold in a bleak, treacherous landscape. It is, I think, the single most impressive film to premiere at Sundance since Half Nelson in 2006, and the high-water mark by which all others in and out of this year's competition should be judged.