Sundance 3

Saturday night's movie was "casting a glance." It is an 'art documentary' by James Benning. He made 16 trips to the Robert Smithson's art installation "Spiral Jetty" (in the Great Salt Lake) from the time of its installation in 1970 to 2005. Each time Benning set up a film camera and let it run for several minutes. He also changed the camera position several times on each visit. The movie shows 5 minute segments from each of the visits. We see beautifully photographed shots of the changing landscape-different seasons, different water levels, etc. Ambient sound and some introduced effects create the background. The only problem is that it's hard to watch basically a series of still photos for 90 minutes! We stuck it out, however, and I plan to go visit the Spiral Jetty at my first opportunity....

Sunday: Up at the usual 5:30 am to get to the Gateway Center Box Office early. This time we were #6 in line! Many people selling extra tix and waiting to see what would be shown when. Today most of the award-winning movies are shown. Check out the Sundance site for the list of winners. The schedule was drawn up listing the award for that time slot, but no one knew the movie for that award until Saturday night. So we had to see the final list posted on the box office door before we could plan the day's movies and see what tickets we should sell.

The other wrinkle is that Utah locals have the opportunity to see 2 movies on Monday night(called "Best of Fest") for free, but those aren't announced until today as well. Our hosts had 4 tickets for each Monday night movie, but also had some tickets for Sunday's award winner showings, so we didn't want to have the same tickets for both days. If you are still following this, I'm impressed! We spent our time in line trying to get it all straight.....

It turned out that we had Sunday tickets for one of the Monday night movies, so we were able to sell the Sunday tix to people in line. That turned out to be "Frozen River", which won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize award.
We bought the Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, which was "Trouble the Water."

We kept the Dramatic Audience Award winner:"The Wackness" for Sunday evening.

We also decided to sell tickets to "World Dramatic Prize winner:" "King of Ping Pong" in favor of "World Documentary Jury Prize winner": "Man On Wire." More on those movies in the next post.


The weather turned very windy and snowy today, with the big storm heading in tonight and tomorrow. My expression in the picture means "Please don't let the camera get wet!"

On to the 3rd movie of the day, so will continue later!