Interview: Part Two of our Conversation with Sundance Doc Programmers Courier and Libresco

On Monday, we posted part one of our lengthy conversation with Sundance programmers (and Documentary team leaders) David Courier and Caroline Libresco.

Today, we dive into the nuts and bolts of the new Spotlight section - and how the programming team decided which films would go into Spotlight and which would go into competition.  I also raise a couple of my issues with last year's festival - the isolated Temple Theatre as a main venue for documentaries and what I felt was an imbalance between issue docs (what we call "bleeding heart docs") and those that are character-driven or built for entertainment.

In having that latter discussion, Libresco and Courier raise a point that I don't know if anyone caught about last year's slate: the overwhelming number of films that featured activists as main characters.

Here's part two of our conversation:
 

All These Wonderful Things:  So one of my grumbles from last year was the Temple (Theatre).

Caroline Libresco:  Oh really?

ATWT:  And I’m curious if that’s going to be back.

CL:  Tell us why, why was it your grumble?

ATWT:  Well, it was really hard to get to, mostly because there was no dedicated shuttle from Main Street.  So you had to switch shuttles I think at the Yarrow and so I found a bunch of folks who were up on Main Street who would, at the last minute, say, “I’m not going to go see x or y film at the Temple because it’s just too much of a hassle and it’s going to take me 25-30 minutes to get there.  And when I went to something at the Temple it was never sold out.  There were always seats available and this was for doc competition films.

CL:  Oh really?  I only was at sold out films.

ATWT:  It wasn’t opening weekend, it was Monday – Tuesday.

CL:  You know what, thank you for that feedback and that is something we both will (talk about).  Actually, I didn’t realize that.  

David Courier:  I didn’t realize the shuttle situation.

ATWT:  And people were calling it the “doc ghetto”.

CL:  Cause our impression was that it's actually the most elegant space we have and so we think of it as the Temple of Docs.

DC:  Exactly.  And the filmmakers’ reaction, just from a technological aspect, the sound is amazing in there, the screen is brilliant…

CL:  There’s a fireplace in the lobby.

DC:  We love that venue.

CL:  We like the sacred idea.

DC:  Yeah, I guess we need to work on making it easier for people to get to.

ATWT:  I think if there was a dedicated shuttle, it was the switching of shuttles that really – and last year was warm, it was balmy for the festival.  If it was freezing…

CL:  That seems like maybe the only glitch is transportation, because once you get there…

ATWT:  And the other thing was that there was nothing really around there so if you were seeing three in a row you were stranded.  You didn’t have enough time to get up to the Yarrow to get a coffee or food.

CL: There's a cafe in the lobby, so you can get coffee and food there.

DC:  I do want to stress that it’s not out of town.  People spread rumors that the Temple was out of town.  It is very much in town.  But it’s like five minutes away from headquarters.  

CL:  I think people tend to think of us as a behemoth with endless amounts of funds and I do want to reiterate to your readers that we are a not-for-profit organization and we actually work on a shoestring believe it or not.  And a shoestring staff who work really, really, really hard.  I think every year we try to address things and make it better and it’s our responsibility to do that and thanks for the feedback but I do want people to know that it’s a process for us and not only do we have the limited financial resources but the limited resources of Park City and where we can show films.  So we were really delighted when this new space came up that was architect-designed, that was being offered to us by the Jewish community with a lot of enlightenment.  They were like, “you can show anything you want here, you can show whatever you want.”

DC:  This is a place for receptions…

CL:  This is a place for dialogues.  We want documentaries here.  We were so delighted by that and so pleased that they designed it with us in mind, to help us create a space for community.  So, we wanna keep building that so it’s better for the audience.

ATWT:  So people going this year, what do you think that they will see that will strike them as new or different?  Anything?  Maybe I’m obsessing about this transition to John (Cooper) and Trevor (Groth) and a somewhat different way of programming, but I’m just curious, will people feel a different festival?

DC:  I think so.  There are fewer premieres, so there will be less of what people inevitably bitch about at Sundance and applaud at the same time.  They want to go there and see the movie stars and everything and yet, that clogs Main Street, so we're doing less of those.  God knows there are lots of big names at Sundance this year.

CL:  It’s tough to get a film financed without some kind of name in it.

DC:  But there are fewer premieres this year and as so many people have been talking about, we’ve carved out a whole new section of the festival called NEXT for low to no-budget filmmakers and there are eight films (in that section).  And we’re not showing more movies than we showed before so we had to carve that out from other places and one of the places that it came from was premieres.  It was an absolute see-saw.

CL:  That’s right.  And also in our Spotlight section, which has eight documentaries, and there are eleven other films, feature films, in that section.  And what we were able to do with that section – we were able to do some cool things. We have five or six films in there of films that we loved that we pulled from other festivals, like (Gaspar Noé's) ENTER THE VOID.  The largest part of our festival – 85% of our festival – is world premieres, but there’s a great opportunity for people to check in to ENTER THE VOID and LOURDES and I AM LOVE, films we unequivocally adore.  We wanted these films to be part of our offering.  I’m excited about that too.

DC:  A really interesting point, which speaks to what you’re talking about and also to your question about Sundance’s place with documentaries – cause we call this section Spotlight, but it means to us “films we love” and we were just going to call it “Films We Love” – for the narrative films, they almost all have played at other festivals, and the documentaries, almost all of them are world premieres.  

CL:  We just have so many opportunities to show brand new docs, we can’t show docs from other festivals basically.

ATWT:  Aside from a few slots in (the) world (competition), cause you show some stuff from IDFA…

CL:  Right, for international docs we can’t offer the kind of marketplace to demand all world premieres.  But we’re always looking for international premieres and world premieres for that section.

DC:  There are some documentaries in our Spotlight section that could have just as easily played in competition and it was a balancing act.  And there are a few that are in there because they can survive without our competition.

ATWT:  So let me ask you about that conversation.  Tell me about that last moment – because I’m assuming that you’re putting things in competition as you go along and then things are moved around – when you talk about balance, like in the competition program, what are some of the things that go into deciding “this should be in competition” and “this is in Spotlight”.

CL:  Largely Spotlight is – and you’ll see this as a kind of pattern that we’ve been honing – it tends to be these kind of “event documentaries”, documentaries that are tapping into a big explosive zeitgeist on some level, like CLIMATE REFUGEES and COUNTDOWN TO ZERO and 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION.  These could be hot button docs, they could take a broader swath, so we feel like we can almost call them an event unto themselves, they kind of stand on their own. It’s tough to explain because there’s a kind of organic conversation that happens that’s, on some level, a sixth sense that we’ve all developed together on how we want the competition to feel.  And this is something that most people don’t connect with, we are the only people who it really matters to in a way, but it’s the full complement of the competition and how each competition Is a balance unto itself and represents a range of styles and topics and regions and concerns in the world and aesthetic concerns as well.  That’s what we’re shaping and no one sees all 16 films in our competition or all 12 films (in the world competition), so we’re the only ones, sadly, who care.  But we do care, we do care.  And for us, it’s a work of beauty.  It actually makes sense to us.  It’s a private process, but it makes sense to us.  

DC:  And we’re balancing not just issue-related docs with fun-watch docs, we’re trying to get a balanced program in the competition, but certain films we look at as “this film could only play in competition”.  Often what that means is that it’s not one of these big issue related docs, it’s smaller – OCTOBER COUNTRY is a perfect example.  That film would have played in our competition if it had made the schedule.

CL:  It wouldn’t probably have played in Spotlight, because it would have needed the support of competition.  Of course, some films in the competition don’t need the support.  It’s really a balance we’re trying to strike.

DC:  You know, Adrian Grenier’s documentary, TEENAGE PAPARAZZO, is shockingly well-made.

CL:  It’s amazing.

DC:  It’s an incredible film.  And we basically had to make the call that this film – he is the absolutely perfect person to be making that film at this particular time given the zeitgeist of Entourage and everything.

CL:  And it’s really integrated into how he tells the story in a beautiful way – himself and his celebrity.  

DC:  It’s in Spotlight because it can survive.  In fact, it’s in Spotlight and its playing in bigger theatres than a lot of the competition docs.

CL:  And people will flock to it.  People will find it.  (Those films) tend to have their own momentum, because of how they play or the topic that they deal with. 

ATWT:  It was sort of famous last year, John Cooper gave an interview and he said, this year the docs are going to tell you what to do.  [ed. note: Cooper's quote to the LA Times was: "They are basically telling you what to do, versus 'This is something that is doing on."]  And then I saw a bunch of the films and like END OF THE LINE had the seven-point plan.  And FOOD, INC., which you guys didn’t show but was at Toronto, has the plan at the end.  And there’s been a little bit of discussion – and I’ve been one of the people who has been saying it, admittedly – that last year it seemed like that balance between the issue doc and the more poppy or more character driven doc might have been (leaning) more toward the issue doc.  Is that something that you think is true?  Do you think that I’m wrong?

CL:  We don’t make the docs.

ATWT:  You’re looking at what’s coming in.

CL:  Yeah.  I think people get confused sometimes too by saying, “well, Sundance is showing this” and actually we’re evaluating what’s there from what the filmmakers are making.  I think it’s more of a zeitgeist of the filmmaking community than about our choices, our “grand plan” for what we think should be done regarding docs.

ATWT:  So you’re saying there wasn’t a bunch of moustache twisting going on behind the scenes.

DC:  But don’t you agree, every year there are more issue docs than anything, don’t you think?  People getting empowered to take a stance on some issue that they feel strongly about and making a documentary about it.  It’s a clearer choice for a filmmaker, I think, to make a film about some issue they feel strongly about as opposed to some character-driven documentary.  It’s a different mind-set.

ATWT:  I feel like (the community) is having this interesting discussion right now.  I don’t know if you heard about Jess Search and the BBC’s Nick Fraser, they have this huge debate at Sheffield about whether campaign films, their word for activist-driven films, whether that was the death of documentary or not, with Nick saying, yes it was, and Jess saying no, it’s fine to get these NGO’s and all these organizations coming in (to get involved with films that represented their viewpoint or cause).

CL:  Here’s the thing.  I think what we noticed last year – and I think this was more of what Cooper was talking about last year – was that the films' characters and protagonists, themselves, were the activists in the field making change, as in THE COVE, as in DIRT! THE MOVIE, CRUDE…

ATWT:  REPORTER in a way.

CL:  The protagonists in the films were not victims of the issue.  It used to be the protagonist was the victim going “I am the victim of the Bhopal chemical spill”.

DC:  Now we have THE YES MEN, who are real characters.

CL:  If you look at that crop of films, it really was about the activist as protagonist, being the story-maker.  So, I think that was what was different.  I haven’t looked to see if we’ve got that going on this year.

ATWT:  It doesn’t seem that way.

CL:  But certainly in the Muhammed Yunus film (TO CATCH A DOLLAR).

DC:  Yeah, and GASLAND, Josh Fox is a great character.  

CL:  He’s a journalist character.  He hasn’t really joined the fight in the film.  He’s getting the story.

DC:  Right, he’s getting the story but he’s an entertainer, too.  He’s dealing with an issue, but he’s got a sense of humor that helps to keep people watching that film and is going to bring a lot of people to it because it’s fun.

CL:  He’s discovering the issue in the film, like through the process of the film, which is a little different from “I am totally ensconced in this and I am changing the world around this.”  But I think TO CATCH A DOLLAR is the consummate activist film in the sense that it is chronicling the work of activists around micro-banking in a new environment – the US this time – and looking at the supreme activist, Yunus, and how his work has (affected change).

DC:  And on the opposite end of the spectrum is a film called A SMALL ACT that we’re showing, which literally tells the ramifications of one little act of charity, anonymous charity by this woman in Sweden, who sponsored this young boy in Kenya under some program, 15 dollars a month, not even thinking about it.  And it allowed him to go to secondary school, he wound up being educated at Harvard.

CL:  He’s now a UN staffer working on genocide and refugees.

ATWT:  Whoa, that gave me chills.

DC:  And now he started a foundation, which he named after her.  It’s called the Hilde Back Foundation and then he located her after he started the foundation.

CL:  And she was completely confounded.  She was like, “what?  I didn’t do anything.”

DC:  And his foundation supports kids in Kenya, in his village, going to secondary school.

ATWT:  I’m imagining a very long, standing ovation after those two take the stage after that first screening.

CL:  It doesn’t seem that we have the same density of films like you discussed.  I don’t think it’s there as much.

ATWT:  You’re still dealing with serious issues, it seems, but it doesn’t seem to be coming from the same kind of place.

DC:  What I’m realizing, having this conversation…


CL:  It’s so great to have this conversation.  It’s the first time we’ve been able to talk.

DC:  Yeah.  A lot of our issue docs are a combination of issue and character docs.  Like Hilda Bock – these are actual characters.  And Josh Fox?  He’s a character.  

CL:  And Althea in TO CATCH A DOLLAR is a total character-activist.

DC:  So it’s not just issue, issue, issue, these are really entertaining films to see at the same time and I think that is what probably pushed them over as opposed to the other, just more issue-related docs, that didn’t make the cut for us.

CL:  It’s interesting in documentary – it’s still about character development.  Always.  

Comments

[A Facebook User]

Programming is slowly becoming a popularity contest that no longer serves art, but some undefined agenda. Isn't the whole purpose of a festival to bring the undiscovered--films like "October Country"--to the surface for the audience? Instead, we celebrate, well, celebrity. Or worse, we judge films for their activist intentions rather than for their artistic strengths. Why don't we acknowledge films like "October Country" the same way we see "Ballast", "Old Joy" and other distinctly fresh films?

If "Salesman"--a film about "ordinary" bible salesmen--was sent to Sundance 2010, would it make the cut?