Sundance 2010 New Frontier: Seeing Hitch in Double, Animal Collective in Oddsac

This year’s New Frontier section, a collection of six works that bend the rules of cinema, and are generally neglected from the press includes Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take (another picture that received its North American premiere at the Nouveau Cinema Festival in Montreal, making the Park City screening a U.S. premiere. Something tells me I’ll be indulging in the NF section with a quota of at least three works. Dammit, I’m already breaking out in hives with the monstrous task ahead of me of covering the festival from top to bottom.

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers / USA (Director and screenwriter: Tim Rutili)—A fortune teller lives and works in an old house crowded with ghosts. When a mysterious light appears in the woods, the ghosts realize they are trapped and begin to rebel. Cast: Angela Bettis. World Premiere

Double Take/Germany, Netherlands (Director: Johan Grimonprez)—Director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. The master says all the wrong things at all the wrong times while politicians on both sides desperately stammer to say the right things, live on TV. Cast: Mark Perry, Ron Burrage. North American Premiere

Memories of Overdevelopment / USA (Director and Screenwriter: Miguel Coyula)—Live action mixes with animation and newsreel footage of historical events to form a collage that emulates the way personal memory works for a misanthropic Cuban intellectual. An adaptation of a novel by Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes. Cast: Ron Blair. World Premiere

Oddsac/USA (Director: Danny Perez)—Perez)—An earthy, psychedelic experimental narrative infused with the band, Animal Collective’s aural and musical sensibilities. World Premiere

Pepperminta/Austria, Switzerland (Director: Pipilotti Rist; Screenwriters: Pipilotti Rist, Chris Niemeyer)—A magical, visually stunning and uplifting contemporary fantasy, Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. Colors are the young woman’s best friends and strawberries are her pets. Together with her friends she sets out to fight for a more humane world. World Premiere

Utopia in Four Movements/USA (Directors: Sam Green and Dave Cerf)—A “live documentary” this piece explores the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the 21st century through several seemingly unrelated vignettes — including a history of Esperanto, a portrait of an exiled American radical, and a meditation on the world’s largest shopping mall. World Premiere