Sundance Journal 2009: Business as Usual

The New Frontier officially kicked off Sundance yesterday and if there are is a lot of question marks and emphasis placed on what will happen with distribution side of the biz, anyone with enough foresight can clearly see that it is the merging of the different media platforms which will establish the rules. John Cooper was on hand to open the section and Sundance programmer Shari Frilot (see pic) announced some of the participants involved.
No disrespect to the artists that came beforehand, but I always felt that this sidebar exposition was a bit like a misused museum-like space where my main interest was getting wifi for my laptop. However with works like Candice Breitz’s Mother+Father (a six screen melange of famous actresses/actors) and Omer Fast’s The Casting (a four panel installation) are just a some portion of some of the neater items that will finally make this fringe sidething a mainstay.

The opening was then followed by the opening press conference at the Egyptian – a busy as usual Q&A that saw Robert Redford and sidekick Geoffrey Gilmore discuss the past and sparsely discussed the future. In other words, it was business as usual with no silver lining for “the 25 edition” which is according to Redford no more important than the 24th or the upcoming 26th editions.

Oddly, the conference broke with tradition: the opening film’s filmmaker was not on hand. The journo sitting next to me opened up the town hall thingie with Sundance’s projected future – which sort of follows on the coat tails of what Tribeca is doing. The Middle East has the cash flow and wants to bring on board the influential players – and this is a role that Redford is poised to move forward with. Among other issues discussed we have the distribution side of the business which is getting really interesting in both bad and good ways.