Prized Possessions
columbia’s top entries at sundance 2008
Adventures of Power, a comedy about a copper miner with a passion for air drumming (air guitar’s elusive and neglected stepbrother) premiered at the Sundance at Midnight series, which tends to feature more adventurous avant-garde films and attracts the drunkest and rowdiest of Sundance crowds. The film, starring Adrian Grenier of Entourage fame, was directed by and co-stars Ari Gold (CC ’92). Although Power is his first feature film, Gold, who attended New York University’s film school after his undergraduate studies at Columbia, has previously been at Sundance with three short films. To delve into the psychology of his character, Gold attended an air guitar competition as his character Power, playing the air drums alongside air guitarists. “On a simple level, I thought air drumming was funny and I developed this character,” Gold says. “But on a larger level, I liked the theme of someone discovering that he doesn’t need to have these objects outside of himself, that he doesn’t need the drums to be complete. You know it’s mainly a comedy, but that whole other side makes it interesting to me.” The crowd responded well to this quirky comedy—screening audiences begged Gold to perform some air drumming.
After making a splash at Sundance with Half Nelson in 2006, writer-director team Anna Boden (CC ’02) and Ryan Fleck returned to the festival this year. Their film, Sugar, tells the story of a Dominican baseball pitcher named Miguel “Sugar” Santos who is recruited for America’s minor leagues. As he travels from an American baseball-training academy in the Dominican Republic to a Single-A farm team in Bridgetown, Iowa, he navigates a new language and culture in his journey to become a sports star. Production designer Elizabeth Mickle (CC ’03) creates vivid and disparate landscapes from the Dominican Republic to Iowa and New York City. Mickle describes Sugar as a “story about a boy from a developing country who puts all his hope into the American dream ... then to find himself bewildered in the Bronx trying to find a life for himself after his dream has been lost. It’s a much more common story than we realize, and it raises many questions about U.S. exploitation.”
One of the 16 U.S. films in the Dramatic Competition category, Frozen River took home the Grand Jury Prize. Writer-director Courtney Hunt (School of the Arts ’94) weaves together the story of two poor, single mothers—one white and one Mohawk—whose lives intersect as they work together to smuggle illegal immigrants into the U.S. The director met one of her principal actresses, Melissa Leo, at the 2001 Columbia University Film Festival, during a special screening of 21 Grams. Carol Becker, the dean of the School of the Arts says, “I have to say that [Frozen River] really blew my mind—an amazing film.”
Winner of both the audience and jury prizes for world documentary, Man on Wire is a portrait of French aerialist Philippe Petit and his daring dance 1,350 feet above the ground. Subsequently arrested for what has been deemed the artistic crime of the century, Petit pirouetted on a high-wire suspended between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The film, directed by James Marsh and co-produced by Maureen Ryan, a ’92 graduate and current faculty member of the School of the Arts, dramatically recreates the exhilarating feat. At Columbia, Maureen teaches “Producing the Short,” as well as a documentary-filmmaking class, and oversaw student productions this year. “I’ve been on the faculty of the film school since 1999,” she says, “so I am intimately in touch with people who were on the faculty when I was a student. And then, of course, being a part of the faculty myself, it’s had a very strong impact on myself, my career, my filmmaking. You’re constantly invigorated by the energy of the students who you are working with, and their fresh ideas and fresh eyes.”
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for a U.S. documentary film, Trouble the Water follows a couple videotaping their lives while trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, as well as their new beginning in the aftermath of the storm’s destruction. Co-director Carl Deal (Journalism ’96) says of his experience with directing partner Tia Lessin, “Having been through 9/11 and pretty close to the Trade Center during that, we discovered that the most we have to offer is our skills as filmmakers. So when Katrina came, it wasn’t a question of when would we go to Louisiana, but how quickly could we get there.”
A series of four-minute interviews, The Black List explores the themes of black culture and identity through the voices of influential African-American authors, politicians, athletes, actors, musicians, and comedians. The director—acclaimed portrait photographer and documentarian Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (CC ’74)—created the concept for The Black List while having lunch with Toni Morrison, who suggested that he create a photography book on black opera stars. After sharing his ideas with friend Elvis Mitchell, Greenfield-Sanders realized the vast potential of a broader project. Greenfield-Sanders says of the meeting that “the more we talked, we realized it needed to be a documentary ... and by the end of lunch we had 175 names on a napkin.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Toni Morrison, Reverend Al Sharpton, Chris Rock, former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Colin Powell are just a few of the subjects who share their individual experiences and viewpoints. One of the unique stylistic elements of The Black List is that the film, shot in medium-close up at Greenfield-Sanders’ studio at his home in New York, is very minimally edited. Shots are broken up only by photographs, allowing the interviews to remain intact and foster an eye-to-eye intimacy. Interviewer Elvis Mitchell remains unseen and unheard in the documentary to allow each interview to unfold as if the subject were telling a personal story. The film was acquired by HBO Documentaries before the start of the festival and re-titled The Black-List: Volume I. Greenfield-Sanders said he looks forward to the endless sequel potential of the project through future films, books, and a user-generated web site that will broaden and strengthen the discourse on race issues in America.
Tom Kalin, associate film professor at the School of the Arts, returns to Sundance a second time with Savage Grace. The film tells the true story of the shocking 1972 Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case, starring Julianne Moore as Daly, a former actress and aspiring socialite who married into the wealthy Baekeland family of the Bakelite plastic fortune, and her dysfunctional, incestuous relationship with her son. Kalin, who teaches “the imaginatively titled classes ‘Directing I’ and ‘II’” at the graduate school, finds that a career in academia supports his professional film work. “The students I’m working with are in the same place I was once. We have such a great body of students at Columbia. You learn a lot, teaching—about what your own game is, but also from their perspectives.” Savage Grace will screen at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival and in Columbia’s Carla Kuhn Speaker Series this April, and it will be released by IFC on May 30.
In Hamlet II, British comedian Steve Coogan plays a failed actor-turned-self-loathing high school drama teacher who stages a musical sequel to Hamlet to try to save his school’s drama department. Co-written by South Park/Team America: World Police writer Pam Brady, Hamlet II is executive produced by Albert Berger (CC ’83) and stars Catherine Keener, David Arquette, and a self-parodying Elizabeth Shue. During Sundance, Focus Features bought Hamlet II for $10 million, a sum very close to the Sundance record of $10.5 million set by indie-hit Little Miss Sunshine, also produced by Berger two years ago. “The film is about an out-of-work character actor who now teaches drama at the high school in Tucson, and they’re going to shut down the drama department, so he writes the sequel to Hamlet as a musical in order to save drama. And it’s a comedy.”