Sundance's Rebel Yell
The festival goes back to its roots — or does it?
I had been asking people all week what they thought of Sundance's anti-establishment branding, and no one had come out as guilelessly supportive of it as Radnor. Privately, they'd roll their eyes and bemoan the self-serving hypocrisy of a festival that accommodates so many boldface names and indie clichés pushing its rebel credibility. "There's no aggression in any of these films," protested a producer who just completed a five-figure movie, and who singled out the surprisingly conventional, Sundance cliché–ridden NEXT films for using the "freedoms" afforded by new technology "for evil instead of good."
Bernard recalled a conversation he'd had with Sundance's Groth. "I said, 'Trevor, what exactly does rebellion mean? Are you rebelling against your mom? What's the deal?' He said it was a shorthand, and there had been a long meeting as to what the meaning of rebellion was. Which I never quite got from him."
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That the festival had subjected the decision to be "rebellious" to a bureaucratic process would seem to validate the complaints.
But when speaking on the record, many were more diplomatic. Hope referenced James Fallows' Atlantic essay "How America Will Rise Again," with its emphasis on "the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal," as a parallel to how the indie industry can heal itself.
"We can be cynical about going back to our roots," Hope said, but just as the '70s American new wave rose out of Hollywood's post-television '60s bloat and panic, "there's always a rise after a fall, a cleaning house."
Durra nodded vigorously. "Look, if someone told me to rebel, I'd be, like, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means, I'm just going to make my film,' " she said. "But when people see that a film like mine was chosen as a 'rebellion' film, they might understand that rebellion is just a move away from enforced stereotypes. It's just about cleaning house."
The consensus is that this housecleaning was overdue — for Sundance and the movie business in general. "Things are changing dramatically," Bernard acknowledged. "But I think they're changing for the good."
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