Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Sundance scene: fur hats, hot chocolate, mountains. Lots of sitting in dark screening rooms, standing at parties, and snowboarding. And the conversation: all film, all the time.
At the party thrown by Participants Productions, guests had plenty of projects to talk about. The company has backed the widely released feature “Syriana”; the documentary about the world influence of a children’s television show produced in Queens, “The World According to Sesame Street,” and Vice President Gore’s project about global warming, “The Inconvenient Truth.”The party had a power crowd, including Gores, Larry and Laurie David, the siblings Elisabeth and Andrew Shue, and Participant Production president Ricky Strauss and executive Diane Weyermann, who previously headed the Sundance Institute’s documentary program.
It’s fun to see the mix of talents at the festival. Judy Collins, Rufus Wainwright, and U2’s the Edge attended the premiere of the film about the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, “I’m Your Man.” The New York entertainment consulting firm Cinematic Media had the prettiest group of actors in attendance, including Amber Tamblyn, Jennifer Dundas, and Elizabeth Reaser.
One of the young directors getting attention at the festival is Brooklyn-based Ryan Fleck, whose film “Half Nelson” is being screened in the Independent Film Competition. It is a feature-length adaptation of “Gowanus, Brooklyn,” which in 2004 tied for the Grand Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking. The subject is the friendship between a white urban schoolteacher and a student.
New York stories and personalities continue to fascinate, as the documentary about New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz demonstrates. It’s easy to imagine the lines when “Wordplay,” directed by Patrick Creadon and produced by Christine O’Malley, opens here.
Fortunately for those not in Park City this week, most of the buzzed-about films will have their turn here – if not in commercial theaters, then at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which recently announced it will be screening Sundance films in May, likely to be a film-centric month in New York, with the Tribeca Film Festival also on the calendar.
