Surfers, samurais and siblings at Sundance.

This fall I spent two weeks doing nothing but watching movies. All day, every day, starting at 10 in the morning and going, sometimes, until 10 at night. I was screening International and American feature entries for the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, which starts this weekend in Park City, Utah. As one of the first wave of screeners my job was to weed through an assigned lot of entries, writing a page or two of coverage for each and assigning it an overall rating from one-five. The programmers would take those, view the best, and make their decisions. It sounds easy enough – a bowl of microwave popcorn, a big box of chocolates, and a few ticks of the pen – but by the end my eyes were burnt, my bottom hurt, and I was thoroughly sick of angsty first films. Besides which, how do you compare, say, a campy Brazilian flick about sex, dancing and a lost pair of shoes with an unrelentingly intense German drama about a local swimming pool? Still, out of the 75 there were at least 10 that I thought might make it into the festival. Turns out there were only two. One, which I detested (shows how much my opinion was worth), called Harry And Max, about two pop-star brothers who are a bit too close, and another, Azumi, a Japanese samurai movie that is really just pure cinematic joy. If chicks-with-swords turn you on, you’ll love Aya Ueto, who stars as the titular Azumi, a well-trained assassin let loose in 17th-century Japan to swashbuckle her way through the bad guys.

Also of note at this year’s Sundance is Riding Giants, the first documentary ever to open the festival. Following on the heels of other 2003 high-profile surfing documentaries, Step Into Liquid and Billabong Odyssey, Riding Giants was directed by Stacy Peralta, better known as a skateboarder and director of 2002’s skater doc Dogtown and Z-Boys. Jade Chang 16 January 04

useful link: www.sundance.org