Cortez
Dir: Cheryl Nichols
Cortez
Struggling musicians and their lost flames are a clichéd subject matter but what makes Cortez stand out from the outset, says Clark, is how the film opens, midsentence, with two men, strangers, enjoying a hot tub conversation about the pathways of life. Only a director who is very sure about the tone and characterization she wants to elicit in her film would choose to begin in such a way, implying that it’s all the more admirable that Cheryl Nichols did so for her debut film.
Nichols, by contrast, readily admits that Cortez remained a mystery to her until half way through the editing process. She co-wrote it with Arron Shiver (both play the leads as well) in 2013, before they were a couple. Their writing sessions became informal dates where they would tell each other stories, resulting in a film that is highly personal and intertwined with the process of its writing and making. Nichols describes the final project as an atypical hero’s quest, and particularly, a man’s journey told from her unique and definitively female perspective. Set in a hippie town in New Mexico, the family narrative the film chronicles is as tangled and fractured as the southwestern landscape that lends it an inimitable sense of place.
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Hotel Coolgardie
Dir: Pete Gleeson
Hotel Coolgardie
Pete Gleeson directs this documentary about two Finnish women who travel to a highly remote bar in Coolgardie, in the outback of Australia, to work for a few months as barmaids. Clark says, “It is almost shocking because this town is set up as the worst in what you would consider as the “male gaze,” the culture of men looking at and treating women in a certain way. It’s kind of disgusting, the attention that they’re given. It’s visceral and uncomfortable.” She adds that what’s further unique about this setting is the girls who have already been there for a while, before the Finnish women got there, and the doc explores the complicated gender dynamics of how living with the attention of hot-blooded and inebriated men affects this community of female foreigners in ways good and bad.
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Withdrawn
Dir: Adrian Murray
Withdrawn
Although some of the key lines were scripted, Withdrawn was shot off a 15-page outline (consisting of each scene’s action, character motivation and setup), leaving all the dialogue to be improvised by director and co-writer Adrian Murray, co-writers Marcus Sullivan and Dean Tardioli, and key cast members Aaron Keogh and Molly Reisman. Murray says that film is an investigation of solipsism but Clark says this wry comedy about a slacker who unwittingly gets into credit card fraud is “so funny in a low key way. This is not hi-jinx. It’s not broad comedy. But it’s really smart, inventive filmmaking” with a “simple but really well-executed premise” that you could go back to study the composition of shots, “which is funny for something that is so low-budget and shot in non-descript apartments.”
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Dave Made A Maze
Dir: Bill Watterson
Dave Made A Maze
Clark says Dave Made A Maze is a “quintessential Slamdance film” with as much as “heart as there is oddity” and with an “inventiveness” and “love of filmmaking and creativity” that is “absurd but also accessible.” The lead character Dave, played by Nick Thune, gets trapped inside a 20-room fort he has built inside his living room, and his girlfriend Annie, played by Meera Rohit Kumbhani, sets off on a rescue mission to find him.
Director and co-writer Bill Watterson (whose acting creds include Ouija and Brooklyn Nine Nine) says that the Maze is ultimately a metaphor for the creative process. In actuality it was made using more than 30,000 square feet of cardboard and 3000 glue sticks, and enhanced by old-school practical effects such as puppetry, stop motion animation and cut paper animation. Add a dash of the supernatural to the mobile and tactile sense of awe the set piece and the story generate, and you’re taken on an ’80s ride through madcap fantasy worlds where adults try to arrive at an absolution with regard to the incomplete projects of their lives.
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Friday, January 20
10:30 a.m. – The Modern Jungle, Ballroom
12:30 p.m. – Cortez, Ballroom
2:45 p.m. – Wexford Plaza, Ballroom
6:45 p.m. – What Lies Upstream, Ballroom – Opening night screening
Saturday, January 21
5:00 p.m. – Bogalusa Charm, Gallery
5:45 p.m. – Withdrawn, Ballroom
8:00 p.m. – Dave Made A Maze, Ballroom
Sunday, January 22
2:15 p.m. – Kuro, Ballroom
Monday, January 23
10:30 a.m. – Dave Made A Maze, Ballroom
3:00 p.m. – Hotel Coolgardie, Gallery
3:00 p.m. – What Lies Upstream, Ballroom
5:15 p.m. – Kuro, Gallery
7:30 p.m. – The Modern Jungle, Ballroom
7:45 p.m. – Suck It Up, Gallery
Tuesday, January 24
7:15 p.m. – Cortez, Gallery
Wednesday, January 24
11:00 a.m. – Suck It Up, Ballroom
1:30 p.m. – Bogalusa Charm, Ballroom
4:00 p.m. – Withdrawn, Ballroom
8:45 p.m. – Wexford Plaza, Ballroom
Thursday, January 25
2:30 p.m. – Hotel Coolgardie, Ballroom MM
Slamdance runs January 20-26, 2017 in Park City, Utah.
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