Seattlest at Sundance: Final Cut Pro

The last film we caught at the festival was The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, best known for his 2003 Sundance darling The Station Agent. Like the previous film, McCarthy's sophomore piece is a well-crafted work about how people from disparate backgrounds can come together and form an unconventional family. Walter Vale, an uptight widower and bored college econ professor, has totally shut down and withdrawn from everything in his life, but when he heads to NYC for a conference, he finds a young Muslim couple, Tarek and Zaineb, living in his usually-empty apartment. He takes pity on them and lets them stay, and a friendship develops--until Tarek becomes a victim of racial profiling and is sent to an immigrant detention center, and Walter decides to take responsibility for his new friends. The Visitor is such a quintessential indie picture: the cast, led by Richard Jenkins, is strong, the writing is elegant, and the cinematography is simple yet effective. Most importantly, the film doesn't beat you over the head with immigration issues or over-the-top commentary on the war on terror. The messages here are nuanced, and conveyed more through subtle camerawork than bloviated speechifying. Thank god.

And now a few thoughts about the fest as a whole: Due to some changes this year in ticketing procedure for both general festival-goers and press, there were a lot more people showing up to see films without tickets, trying to get in via the waitlist line. As a result, we only saw fourteen films over five days, down from sixteen in four days last year. We were tragically, just barely, shut out of the mixed-reviewed adaptation of Chuck Palahnuik's Choke and the highly-regarded biodiesel documentary Fields of Fuel, while we missed out on the way-buzzed-about The Wackness twice (to which we say: now *that* is the wackness). Still, we did take in an ungodly number of movies in a short time period, and we met and had discussions with plenty of great people, like folks from Microsoft hawking their new HDi technology (sorry guys, BluRay is winning that war), or one of the producers of our beloved Sugar, which (as of yesterday) still didn't have a distribution deal, a crying fucking shame. There's truly nothing like Sundance to invigorate one's love of film. All the same, we're glad to be back home and out of that damnable industry bubble. And yes, we're already thinking about next year.