late fall 2009 series

Perhaps you've heard of the Sundance Film Festival? Begun in the late 70s in Salt Lake City with the name Utah/US Film Festival, this little festival that could, really did, and then some. With Robert Redford there to shepherd it from the very beginning, the goal of the original festival was to showcase strictly American-made films and highlight the potential of independent film.

In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, Utah and changed its timing from September to January. In the mid-'80s, the name was changed to Sundance, which matched the previously established Sundance Institute, both of which were named after Redford's character The Sundance Kid in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Lots of today's most well-known independent filmmakers, including Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh and Jim Jarmusch had their big break at Sundance, and the Festival continues to launch the careers of new filmmakers.

But the atmosphere of the Festival has changed dramatically over the decades from a low-profile venue for small-budget, independent creators from outside the Hollywood system to a media extravaganza of Hollywood celebrities, distributors looking for the next big "indie" hit, paparazzi, and displays of the latest digital technologies. The scope of the Festival has also changed and now includes international cinema and a showcase for more experimental work.

Nestled within all the hype, glamour and glitz, though, one can still find a lot of great film, and Cornell Cinema's Late Fall '09 Flicksheet is a testament to that fact, as it includes seven wonderful films--both documentaries and features--that had their premieres at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Three of the titles are part of our Earth Days series (No Impact Man, Earth Days and The Yes Men Fix the World); one is a great British comedy having a return engagement in Ithaca (In the Loop); one was written and directed by Ithaca native Katherine Dieckman and stars Uma Thurman (Motherhood); and the remaining two, both Ithaca premieres (Mary and Max and Unmade Beds) are two of the best films you'll see this year. Mary and Max, an animated feature about the unlikely friendship between an Australian girl (voiced by Toni Colette) and a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's Syndrome (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), is darkly comic, touching and insightful. Alexis Dos Santos's Unmade Beds will make you want to be a 20-something hipster living in London, despite the heartache and search for identity, because it all looks sooooo incredibly appealing, with its "art-pop sensibility, bursting with the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-wai...The film has an intoxicating quality." (Village Voice)

As we like to say here at Cornell Cinema, we're Ithaca's year-round film festival, but in this particular calendar, we're Ithaca's very own Sundance Film Festival!