Mermaids, beautiful young boys and half-women half-butterflies populate the release slate on Indiepix’s schedule of announced new acquisitions this month, which will begin with Oleg Tchnerny’s lovely black and white short “Ephebes and Courtesans”, a 26-minute expose on the beauty of young men (and women), set in a Parisian cafe. Blending whirling-dervish camera setups with dizzying local beauties, “Ephebes..” is breathtakingly close to walking down the Champs-Elysees with a bottle of good wine in tow. Lev Polyakov’s blockily animated “Morning, Day, Evening, Night. . .And Morning Again” is a bittersweet parody of the impermanence of love: a man falls in love with a half-woman, half-butterfly, only to have her crumble in his arms after making love to her. Anton Trofymov completes this triad of upcoming new releases with the uniquely humorous (and long-awaited) “The Mermaid”, where viewers will get to see what happens when a young man is finally reunited with the mermaid he thinks he’s lost at sea. . .

The grittier, edgier, and more punk rock sister of Sundance, Slamdance, is often overlooked by media and industry. This is a shame. While in Park City, I made it to the top of the hill that is Main Street to Slamdance HQ only once, but it was WELL worth it.
After gorging on a free Stella Artois-sponsored meal at a Twin Peaks-esque mountain lodge, I hopped in the shuttle back to main street. A bit weary and bloated with beer and grits (yes, grits! but the gourmet kind!), I walked into the cinema with trepidation. Could I stay awake? Did I want to? What parties was I missing?

The film I was there to see, a documentary called RED WITHOUT BLUE, is being repped by a friend of mine, the noted entertainment lawyer Steven Beer. I should have initially been much more enthusiastic, and looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t. The documentary chronicles twin brothers in Montana, as one of them makes the radical decision to get a sex change. Now why should I have been more interested than the average human? Well, folks, I am an identical twin, just two minutes older than the sister with whom I shared a miniscule little womb for nine months. And yet, perhaps the festival grind had gotten to me, perhaps it had numbed my pleasure centers and sapped my dopamine. So as I sat down in that dark little theatre, I simply thought, I hope I can stay awake.

Well, dear reader, I’m sure you can guess the outcome of this little introduction. How predictable my narrative is! THe film was incredible, and I had to fight back tears throughout. (In the end of course, I succombed). The film was beautifully made, deeply moving and intelligent, expertly edited and completely captivating. After the screening, the twins went up to do a Q & A, and proved to be sensitive and articulate. Alex has now fully transformed into Claire, and is a lovely young woman, who is finding her niche in New York. I built up the courage to approach brother and sister after the screening, and simply told them how deeply moved I was by the story and noting my solidarity as an identical twin myself. It turns out, they are also two minutes apart. The rest of the night I contemplated my own sense of self and twinship. How does this similarity and difference define me? How does gender define my relationship to someone who is nearly my mirror and genetic image? How would I react if my sister was suddenly my brother? I commend Mark and Claire for their bravery, as well as their parents. In fact, their father was so incredible that he paid for Claire’s sex change procedure! And of course, I also commend the filmmaking team of Brooke Sebold, Bonita Sills and Todd Sills, who handled a sensitive issue with such respect and care.

Sundance founder Robert Redford began this year’s opening press conference on what seemed a rather defensive note. After admitting that the festival had indeed, become bloated by the acquisitions war and industry bigwigs, he heralded a return to the pioneering, cinephiliac spirit of its very first incarnation. A symbolic testament to this were the countless buttons decorating the Park City venues, emblazened with the slogan “FOCUS ON FILM.” In this spirit, my first blog entry about this country’s most media-saturated, celebrity-laden film festival will focus not on the bling and the buzz, but on the very best films I had the opportunity to see during my 10 exhausting days there.

AWAY FROM HER directed by the inimitable Sarah Polley:
Ever since I saw her in Atom Egoyan’s EXOTICA , one of my favorite films of all time, I have been infatuated with Sarah Polley. Something in her very essence reflects an old soul, a wisdom well behind her years or even beyond this era. So I was not surprised that her directorial debut was a story of absolute maturity focusing on an elderly couple and the deterioration of a decades-long relationship due to the ravages of aging. The ever-stunning Julie Christie stars as a woman who begins to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and must make the decision to check into a care facility. Gordon Pinset, a fine Canadian actor previously unknown to me, stars as her husband, a retired professor whose love and respect for his wife is not unaffected by the guilt of certain past indiscretions. That a woman in her late twenties (two years my junior, I am humbled to admit) would focus with such respect on an elderly couple, is truly a gift. It is the rare married couple who age at exactly the same pace, and story of one individual in a married couple deteriorating before the other is a common one. It is a brave and devastating film that Polley has crafted, with with only one misstep of which I can think (and that is merely a question of musical taste.) I would beg everyone to see this film for themselves.

Another review to come in my next post!