by Geralyn Dreyfous
A preview to the Sundance Film Festival, January 20-30.
Getting into Sundance is now officially harder than getting into Stanford or Harvard. Over 10,000 films from around the world were submitted for this year’s festival—115 were selected, representing 40 countries. The body of films keeps growing, but the viewing platforms, both theatrical and broadcast, are getting smaller. This distribution crisis does not seem to dampen enthusiasm—nor creativity. Festival programmers say the documentary category was the hardest to curate because the competition has never been stronger. Hopefully this translates into the best slate of doc films ever exhibited. What follows is my best guess on best of fest.