Snow business

The Sundance Film Festival director, John Cooper, is in a buoyant frame of mind. Exhausted, proud and understandably anxious to see how this year’s selections will go down, Cooper believes the stage is set to build on the success of last year’s edition.

Sundance 2010 was a high-water mark which delighted audiences and brought a spring to the step of the independent industry. The climate of cautious deal-making meant price points on the flurry of deals never came close to the heady days of Hamlet 2 and Little Miss Sunshine, but there was gold in them Utah hills.

The Kids Are All Right, Splice and Winter’s Bone have all made money, grossing $21m, $17m and $6m in the US respectively. They are among a crop of awards contenders which screened at Sundance 2010 and includes Blue Valentine, The Company Men, Waste Land and Restrepo. This year Cooper, director of programming Trevor Groth and their team are confident they have left no stone unturned in their quest to discover new work.

“To be independent, you have to be relentlessly vigilant and keep demanding more and making hard choices,” Cooper says. “My staff travelled more than ever. Our discussions were harder. Submissions came in at about the same number as the year before and with the financial situation we weren’t sure, but everything seems healthy.”

A total of 3,812 feature submissions has resulted in a 115-strong feature roster, of which 94 are world premieres. Entries showcase work from new directors, including two well-known actors who have moved behind the camera (Paddy Considine with Tyrannosaur and Vera Farmiga with Higher Ground), returning alumni (Drake Doremus with Like Crazy, James Marsh with Project Nim) and a host of beloved indie acting talent such as Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Greg Kinnear, Ellen Barkin and independent cinema’s new It Girl, Jennifer Lawrence.

“The diversity of stories from the independent film world is better than it has been in the past,” Cooper suggests, pointing out this includes non-fiction, hence the new Documentary Premieres selection. “We have so many returning film-makers it felt like time to make more room for this section.”

Cooper has often stressed the desire to make Sundance a gathering place for the international film-making community. “I’ve been trying to work closely with Berlin,” he says. “They’re so close to us in the calendar so we wanted to make sure we’re not limiting the opportunity for film-makers to have both experiences. American film-makers need to think globally in order to survive.”

Many US producers and packaging agents would agree and at time of writing Cooper was talking to the Berlinale about getting a number of Sundance titles into the programme. Miranda July’s The Future is already confirmed for both festivals.

Online moves

There will once again be VoD releases through cable channel Sundance Selects, but the festival has ditched last year’s disappointing VoD experiment with YouTube and the low-budget NEXT strand (the section itself returns).

“It came so late in the game that there wasn’t enough time to promote it,” Cooper explains. “We wanted to see if the technology with YouTube was ready to go. It turns out it was, but we couldn’t even announce it until the start of the festival. I’m glad we did it because so much pressure was put on these digital initiatives, but they still need a lot of work to get right.

“We’ve always been a leader in the digital realm for a festival — we were the first with online content and streaming content and putting shorts online. We’re trying to find a bigger way to put the Sundance Institute in the digital realm and our new executive director Keri Putnam is looking into this. I think we’re onto something.”

YouTube is behind the Premieres entry Life In A Day, a patchwork of user-generated content culled from more than 5,000 hours of footage shot on July 24, 2010. Kevin Macdonald directed the film and it will launch on YouTube the same day as its Sundance premiere. “It was a fun ride,” Cooper says, admitting he accepted the film sight unseen. He pauses. “It was a tremendous editing job.”