2018 Sundance Film Festival

Marc Turtletaub is a veteran producer who's no stranger to Sundance having been here with films like Sunshine Cleaning, Our Idiot Brother, Safety Not Guaranteed and of course Little Miss Sunshine. (Big Beach, the production company he heads, also has the animated version of Jack London’s White Fang and The Miseducation of Cameron Post showing in Park City this year).

In 1987, the alternative band REM released the song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It. ” That title could well encapsulate cinema’s enduring fascination with our own demise.

You might think that given his long and varied career, Golden Globe winner Nicolas Cage would be a festival veteran from the early days of Sundance. But when we sat down with the actor at the Mustang Restaurant to talk about Mandy, a violent revenge film playing here in the Midnight section, we learned the surprising news that he is, in fact, a newcomer to the country’s foremost film festival.

Golden Globe winner Idris Elba, steps off the van accompanying him to our interview  wearing a long mouton coat to protect himself from the Park City cold. The 45-year-old British actor is at the Sundance Film Festival with his directorial debut, Yardie, in competition in the World Cinema section.

Andrew Heckler’s directorial debut, Burden, was twenty years in the making but, as the writer-director said, it seems more relevant now than it was in the nineties, when the actual story of Klansman repudiating a life of hate took place in South Carolina. It's not by the film’s linear though compact structure or straightforward photography by Jeremy Rouse that provokes interest,  but the fact that racism is examined through the eyes of a Ku Klux Klansman, who finds himself in a classic dilemma, torn between the woman he falls in love with and the community that raised him.

“There are two kinds of pity,” said Babis Makridis the Greek director returning to Sundance for the second time. “The pity we feel towards someone else that makes us feel like we are good people, and the pity we receive, which also makes us feel good.

It would have been topical enough to make a movie about child molestation involving a sports coach, given, among other things, the recent revelations of the abuse suffered by dozens of young gymnasts which have roiled the US Olympic team. But Jennifer Fox’s The Tale (US Dramatic Competition) is also an amazingly layered, nuanced and powerful film on a difficult and painful subject.

Two Sundance regulars- a snowstorm and Jon Hamm- made their expected appearance over the weekend. Buzz started to circulate, while stars and filmmakers met the press - and that, of course, includes us, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

In 2012 British filmmaker Bart Layton presented his documentary The Imposter at Sundance. It ended up winning a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut later that year.

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