Sundance says: The Festival's Frontier section explores the experimental world of filmmaking. Utilizing new directions in filmmaking and innovative aesthetic approaches, work in the Frontier category challenges and provokes audiences.
Where Is Where? and O'er The Land
Artist Spotlight: The Works Of Maria Marshall
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Maria Marshall)
Maria Marshall's disturbing and gorgeously composed video projections provoke the psychological dimensions of cinema. Often violent and always visually charming, Marshall often uses her two sons in the main roles of her films. Her work tackles fundamental subjects of motherhood, socialization and life experience and takes us back to the world of childhood as a pretext in order to evoke the anxiety of adults.
Lunch Break And Exit
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Sharon Lockhart)
Lunch Break/Exit yield from Lockhart's timely new film and photographic series about the bleak state of US labour. In Lunch Break, a single tracking shot through a long corridor where workers take their lunch hour at the massive shipyard, Bath Iron Works in Maine, reveals how 42 workers spend their lunch break. In Exit, the frame constantly fills with teaming workers each day as they head for home after a long day's work.
O'er The Land
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Deborah Stratman)
A meditation on the US national psyche and the milieu of elevated threat, O'er the Land addresses gun culture, national identity, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence.
Stay The Same Never Change
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Laurel Nakadate; Writer: Laurel Nakadate; Stars: Dirk Cowan, Julie Potratz, Emily Boullear, Cyan Meeks, Tate Buck)
A mix of visual fact and narrative fiction, starring a group of amateur actors in Kansas City. Whether it's a family man looking for beauty or a young woman obsessed with polar bears and Oprah, the characters in this humorous film reveal quiet lives full of sadness and desire.
World Premiere
Where Is Where?
(Country: Algeria; Year: 2009; Director: Eija Liisa-Ahtila)
Where is Where? is an experimental, four channel film based on an incident which happened during the struggle for independence in Algeria. As a reaction to the acts of violence committed by the French, two young Algerian boys murder their friend, a French boy of the same age. The film starts from the present day when the Death enters the house of a poet who is attempting to write about the incident.
World Premiere
You Won't Miss Me
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Ry Russo-Young; Writer: Ry Russo-Young, Stella Schnabel; Stars: Stella Schnabel, Borden Capalino, Simon O'Connor, Carlen Altman, Zachary Tucker)
A portrait of a modern day rebel, Shelly Brown, a 23-year-old, alienated, urban misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.
World Premiere