AT THE 1995 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, A CENTURY AFTER the Lumière brothers presented the first celluloid motion picture, director Michael Almereyda interviewed a crop of independent filmmakers about their thoughts on the future of movies. Were they optimistic or pessimistic? It’s a question broad enough to elicit many different answers, from pointed to digressive. Almereyda and his collaborator Amy Hobby recorded the responses on a plastic Fisher-Price PixelVision camcorder, eliciting an unspoken formal tension between cinema’s past and its technologically democratized future.
The resulting documentary, At Sundance, is an interesting, albeit slight, curio, but two aspects of the film still stand out. First, the number of directors interviewed who remain active and familiar 25 years later: Richard Linklater, James Gray, Todd Haynes, Danny Boyle, and James Mangold, to name just…
