A dark, cavernous room at the Park City Racquet club was filled this past weekend with the music of DJ Motiv-8 and the voices of several hundred people gathered in clusters to dance and swap stories about the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Above their heads, a triptych of video screens played clips from past festival winners, while roving waiters served barbequed beef, chocolate pretzels and tater tots (no doubt a reference to a recent Sundance favorite “Napoleon Dynamite”).

I’m sure Paris Hilton, Justin Timberlake, and other scenemakers were long gone, at this point. All that was left were the true independent filmmakers, Hollywood renegades who wield HD digital video cameras and maxed-out credit cards in pursuit of big screen dreams. Cleveland Heights’ Laura Paglin was sitting on a soft upholstered cube, reviewing some pictures from her Sundance experience on a digital camera. There was a shot of her trying to balance on a snow board, against a mountainous backdrop. There was a glimpse of Robert Redford at the filmmaker’s brunch he hosted at the beginning of the festival. And there’s the shot she particularly covets, a picture of her posing with famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

Paglin’s short documentary “No Umbrella - Election Day in the City” didn’t pick-up any prizes at the festival, but she says it has been selected to run at this year’s Cleveland International Film Festival, paired with the feature-length documentary, “American Blackout”, which won a Sundance Special Jury Prize for documentary. Both films focus on the foul-ups that plagued the 2004 elections. Dayton-area filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, didn’t win any awards for their monumental documentary on childhood cancer, “A Lion in the House”, but viewers around the country will get to see it this June when PBS presents this four-hour epic over two nights. There was one Sundance winner with an Ohio connection, this year. The New Zealand drama “No.2”, featuring Cleveland-born Ruby Dee was named this year’s audience award choice in the World Film category.
 
I squeezed in 15 films and three panel discussions over the course of the ten days of Sundance. I also went to Film Church. That’s what NPR film critic Elvis Mitchell called his talk about the state of the movie industry. Standing at the podium like a preacher in a pulpit, Mitchell railed against some of the new trends of the modern entertainment world, while the audience punctuated his sentences with “amens” and “that’s right!” He acknowledged the appeal of DVD home theaters and video iPods, but he argued that the true movie experience is still a communal one, where we can share our laughter, our terror, and our tears with a room full of people.

Audiences here applaud at the end of a film. One of this year’s festival favorites, “Little Miss Sunshine”, inspired a standing ovation. For all the sideshow flash of celebrities and invitation-only parties, the core of the Sundance experience is a celebration of the power of movies to tell good stories. Over the past two weeks, there were political stories about the Iraq war, there were personal stories about immigrants adjusting to America, and there were satirical stories about the excesses of consumer culture. The fact that a number of predicted crowd-pleasers bombed at multiplexes across the nation this past summer, should give notice to the big film studios that the movie-going congregation wants more than sequels, TV retreads, and digital effects.

Amen.