![]() He immediately sets up an illegal still on her property, puts her to work running it, delivers the moonshine in a snappy roadster and brings about his own downfall by mortally offending the woman's pride. It's a pointed human lesson based on a short story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, about a rich spinster in the Florida of the Prohibition era, who is wooed and won by a sharpster who's after her money and her labor. I'd heard of the Nunez film before it won an award at the 1979 Chicago International Film Festival, but I'd missed seeing it there, and also at Cannes and Toronto in 1980, I finally caught up with it in Utah, and was enchanted. Richard Pearce's "Heartland" and Victor Nunez's "Gal Young Un". The first prize in the festival was shared by two features. when I'd seen so many interesting movies. There hadn't been a week since the Cannes film Festival of. I'd survived the routine of the year-end "Best 10" lists, with all of their re¬minders of how few good films there had been all year long.īut now, in the darkness of a cozy little three-screen theater in Park City's only shopping center, I was remembering how much fun the movies could be, and how easily they could open me up to new experiences and insights. I'd just finished plowing through the commercial Hollywood movies of 1980¬ - the dreariest year in recent history for big movies. What I came away with, after the week, was a genuine sense of challenge and exhilaration. I also saw several independent films that were outside of the competition. I was on the jury for the festival, which meant that during the week I judged eleven recent American independent features, some of them for the second and a few for the third time. You make it happen for yourself, and in Park City, the countless stories of how independent films were financed and made began to add up into a litany of doing the impossible. You don't get to be a filmmaker by earning a degree. Many of the people who do direct their own features may never have studied film. Most of the people who graduate from college with degrees in cinema probably never make an independent film. They have become more common in the last 5 or 10 years for a couple of reasons: idealistically, because film is the language of the new generation, and realistically, because the country is crawling with would-be filmmakers, the universities are turning them out by the hundreds, and there is little opportunity for them to work in overcrowded Hollywood. They had their birth between the late 1930s and the early 1960s in the avant-garde films of such pioneers as Maya Daren, Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clark ("The Connection"), Jonas Mekas, and the young John Cassavetes who made "Shadows". Independent features have been around for a long time, but they probably never have been as numerous, as visible and as good as they are right now. This was the first film festival devoted solely to independent American features, and everybody here knew what an independent film was not: It was not a multimillion-dollar production, it probably had no major stars in it, it was not intended to flatter the lowest common denominator in its audiences. Film and Video Festival, which was born in Salt Lake City and moved this year to the ski resort of Park City, not far from Robert Redford's Sundance complex. That was accepted as a provisional definition, during last week's 3rd Annual U.S. No matter whether it's "commercial," no matter whether Hollywood will finance it, no matter whether anyone will ever want to pay to see it, it has to be told. maybe an independent film is one that tells a story that the filmmaker believes has to be told, no matter what. someone suggested late in the afternoon during one of the long, rambling informal seminars around the fireplace. An independent film had a unique personal vision, surely - except that films such as "Gal Young Un" were visualizations of classic short stories, and films such as "Impostors" looked like no reality anyone had ever seen before. An "independent feature" was one made on a low budget, obviously - but there was a large space between the $70,000 budget of "The Haunting of M" and the $700,000 budget of "Heartland". It was just that nobody seemed to agree.Īn "independent" was someone who worked outside the Hollywood studio system, obviously - except that such established actors as David Carradine and Ralph Waite thought of themselves as independents. Park City, Utah - Up here in the mountains above the Great Salt Lake, everybody seemed to have a definition earlier this month of what an independent filmmaker was. I grow old.I grow old.I shall wear the bottoms of my ski pants rolled. ![]() Organizing files for the launch of our new website, I came upon this. ![]()
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