An Intro to Sundance 2009

Since day one, I've promised festival news as well as Oscar news, so I figure now's a good time to mention that the 2009 Sundance Film Festival is only a week away. It'll run from January 15-25 in its home of Park City, Utah, where hundreds of celebrities will experience snow for the first and only time of the year.

Probably the highest-profile United States-set film festival, Sundance has sixty-four full-length films in competition this year (sixteen each in the categories of U.S. Documentary, U.S. Dramatic, World Cinema Documentary, and World Cinema Dramatic), plus a ton of shorts. It'll also be host to a handful of out-of-competition world premieres hosted by sponsor Entertainment Weekly.

Sundance usual skews too quirky to be too much of a player at the Oscars, but often one or two films will break out into the mainstream (Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, Choke). Of course, there's also a flip side: often studios pay millions for a movie only to see it flop once they distribute it (most infamously with 1999's Happy, Texas and this year's Hamlet 2).

But really, anything can happen. In 2001, Donnie Darko went into the festival with a ton of buzz, left it with barely any, was finally picked up for distribution, crashed and burned in theaters, then ultimately become a massive cult hit on DVD.

Next week, we'll see if there are any future Little Miss Sunshines or Donnie Darkos in the bunch...

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